ABSTRACT
The ethnographic method has a long history within qualitative gang research, employed by the earliest studies of gang life and continuing into the present. The prominence of ethnography has tended to direct scholarly attention away from qualitative interview methods in gang research. This chapter provides an outline of how the qualitative interview method may be employed to study gang life. The main premise is qualitative interviews have a significant methodological advantage in that the repeat questioning afforded by the interview is ideally suited for excavating the extra-conscious – the affective and the subconscious – where much of the logics of action arise. Profiting from this advantage requires activity in both pre-theorization (exploring the extra-conscious much be consciously incorporated to protocol design) and during the interview process; an active-interviewer stance now marginalized in contemporary methodological theories. As a corrective note, this chapter proposes active qualitative interviews of gang life address: a) the centrality of emotions to gangs, b) the role of class dispositions in gang life, and c) the tendency for interviews to confound rationalizations for socially disproved behavior with their actual logics for gang members.
