ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore one specific aspect of adopting C. Wright Mills 'sociological imagination' in prison ethnography the formulation and adoption of critical research values. It explores the importance of delivering accounts which reflect the real, whether positive or negative, and illustrates this point through a consideration of the application of critical research values when undertaking research on prison officers. C. Wright Mills 'sociological imagination' signifies a way of thinking about or interpreting the world. It represents a particular way of conceptualizing and approaching social problems, their implications and resolution. It provides a broad-ranging interpretive framework for locating the individual within structural and social contexts, ultimately providing a new way of understanding the social world that makes intimate connections between individual meanings and experiences, and wider collective and social realities. The chapter concludes different strands of the chapter to delineate six critical research values informed by C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' that may be adopted for future prison ethnographies.
