ABSTRACT
The primary objective of this chapter is to describe the method used to collect the data reported in this book. If you are accustomed to reading primarily quantitative treatments of racial profiling studies, this chapter will be quite different. The data collected, analyzed, and validated is much different from quantitative ways, which employ statistical analysis techniques. The overall purpose of why a qualitative inquiry was selected is twofold: (1) to describe the essence of how minority citizens experienced what they believe to be racial profiling, and (2) to describe how they gave meaning to their experiences. Collecting police stop data cannot effectively answer these two questions. Ask yourself this question before reading on: Do you think that the answers to these two questions could be answered using a quantitative approach?
