ABSTRACT
Drawing from representative examples from three qualitative interview studies with active offenders, this chapter addresses the following questions: What role does gender play in the interview process when talking with active offenders? How do social positions of race, class, and age shape this gendered process? In what ways do gendered interactions affect both what offenders tell us about their experiences and how they talk about the nature of their offending? To what extent are the validity and reliability of what we learn affected by the gender combinations of interviewers and interviewees, and how does this vary across setting and context? Finally, what can we learn from interviews in which gender becomes highly salient in the interview context? In discussing these complex issues, I will assess how researchers’ consideration of these issues can optimise what we learn from offenders.
The interview is an unavoidably gendered interaction. It involves some combination of individuals, each of whom bring gendered identities, ideologies and performances to the exchange. To make this statement, though, is not particularly revealing. Social relations of gender are contingent, situational and historically shifting (see Connell 2002; Lorber 1994). They vary from place to place, from interaction to interaction, and, as intersectional feminist analyses reveal, cannot be divorced from their relationship to other features of identity and social structure – such as race, class and age – with which they combine to create a 162seemingly unending variety of social locations (Baca Zinn et al. 2002; Collins 1990).
The issues I grapple with here thus address the following questions: What role does gender play in the interview process when talking with active offenders? How do social positions of race, class and age shape this gendered process? In what ways do gendered interactions affect both what offenders tell us about their experiences and how they talk about the nature of their offending? To what extent are the validity and reliability of what we learn affected by the gender combinations of interviewers and interviewees, and how does this vary across setting and context? Finally, what can we learn from interviews in which gender becomes highly salient in the interview context?
To assess these issues, I begin with a brief review of the literature on the role of gender in interview research. In each of the three subsequent sections, I draw from one of my major studies to assess the questions raised above. Each employed both male and female interviewers, with additional variations across race, nationality, age and class background. Drawing on representative examples from each, I examine the role that gender (in combination with other variations) plays within the context of the interview process, assess how gender affects data quality and discuss how the researcher’s consideration of these issues can optimise what we learn from offenders.
First, my study of young women’s gang involvement (Miller 2001) provides an opportunity to examine the impact of gender and race when interviewing adolescent female offenders. Second, a study of violence among urban African American youth – focusing here on young men’s participation in sexual exploitation (Miller 2008) – provides a similar opportunity to examine the role of masculinity, race and gender in the construction of male offenders’ accounts. Finally, I move to a study of the commercial sex industry in Sri Lanka (Miller 2000, 2002). This allows me to raise further points about how gendered interactional dynamics are shaped across divergent settings. I conclude with a brief discussion of what my research suggests for how we can best go about conducting and utilising interviews about offending.
