ABSTRACT

The interview is not always a productive method to find out why and how offenders do what they do. In their quest for valid data scholars have pointed to ethnography, mainly stressing its advantages for finding respondents. This contribution does not address ethnography as a mere recruitment tool but as an approach using a variety of methods including participant observation to describe the ‘world’ in which offenders live that provides context and meaning to their behaviour. Using examples of ethnographic research on Moroccan boys in Rotterdam, it is claimed that ethnographic validity is built on repeated measurements, triangulation to various sources and continuous reflection by the researcher.

The interview is not always a productive method to find out why and how people do what they do. One can approach bakers, housewives or even members of parliament and ask them about their daily work. If they have the time, chances are they will be cooperative and answer, but obtaining reliable and valid answers from ‘regular’ populations can still offer methodological challenges. Now, when it comes criminological research, the interviewer can face frauds, carjackers or murderers, and this is where new obstacles loom. Even if he is able to make contact, these offenders may not talk to him, or give invalid answers because they cannot properly remember. Of more importance is that offenders have broken the law or they plan to do so. Talking about this bears obvious risks. Furthermore, feelings of shame or guilt can make people silent. So it is understandable 131that offenders don’t want to talk to researchers, especially when they are (still) free. The success of interviewing offenders is certainly not guaranteed.

Still, most contributions to this volume are based on what offenders say. There is quite a bit of variety on when, where and how to talk to these offenders, but in essence the authors have interviewed them on past behaviour. They have found ways around the obstacles by using a number of strategies and techniques. These vary from recruitment in a detention setting, paying respondents for their cooperation, the use of complex sampling techniques or working with (semi-)experimental settings. Also, ethnography is mentioned. This can refer to researchers doing fieldwork, approaching deviant populations such as drug users, homeless people or prostitutes. Once they have made contact and reached a certain level of rapport, they will sit down and interview the respondent. Thus ethnographic methods are merely used as a recruitment tool.

In this contribution ‘ethnography’ has a different meaning. Here, ethnography is an approach to a phenomenon using a variety of methods, among which is (participant) observation that leads to a certain product. It is not so much the obstacles in recruitment of respondents that have urged researchers to lean over to ethnography, rather it is the scope of the research. Nowadays in a number of disciplines scholars claim to do ethnographic fieldwork, but originally it was connected to anthropology. Anthropologists seldom study isolated aspects, they prefer holistic approaches. This means that the product of ethnography usually would not focus, for example, on the decision-making of burglars but on the ‘world’ in which these offenders live that provides context and meaning to their behaviour. Following Malinowski (1922), ethnographers look for their population in its everyday habitat, using participant observation to gain an inside view on their lives, interpret it and write about it. It is this meaning of ethnography as an approach that I will use in this chapter.

Ethnography of this kind became more popular in the last decades of the past century. Anthropologists such as Geertz (1973) stressed the importance of extensive ‘thick’ descriptions. As a consequence of a shift towards literary influences in social sciences, its narrative descriptions made ethnography attractive. In this period, the positivistic goal of objectivity was under attack and it was more or less replaced by the ideal of representation (Marks and Wester 2008). Descriptions must do justice to subjects. They should be convincing and truthful, they must present the ‘native’s point of view’ (Wolcott 2005: 15–24).

More recently, because of an urge to produce international comparisons and the growing involvement of policy in research, social science methods are getting standardised. This has also touched upon ethnography. Ethnographers argued that they cannot change reality as they find it, and that research must rather be adapted to the field than the other way around. Ethnographers claim flexibility, especially at the beginning of 132research when it is not possible for the researcher to make a distinction between the object he studies and context (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 185; Hammersley 1992). They resist strict standardisation, and believe that a constant process of fine-tuning works better than structuring too strictly in advance. As a consequence, every ethnographic research should have its own approach and form. There is no ideal type for ethnography (Agar 2006).

The key questions in this book Offenders on Offending are on validity. Ethnographers can also study offenders, and if possible they will interview them on past behaviour, but these interviews will not be the sole data source in their research. It seems only fair to also look at validity in relation to ethnographic research, as it has been dealt with in the other chapters of this book. Ethnography provides statements on (other) people, based on empirical research. What means and arguments can bring value to these statements? Value that goes beyond trivialities, presumptions or ethnocentric judgments (Marks and Wester 2008). In the following paragraphs I will use my PhD research on Moroccan boys (Van Gemert 1998) to bring across a number of these means and arguments.