ABSTRACT
Conducting criminological research in rural settings based only on the official data does not always provide the full picture of the scale of the problem. This comes mainly from the fact that crime in a rural setting is often underreported due to the nature of the offence, the conditions in the specific settings, or previous negative experiences with reporting to the police. In that situation, accessing people's experience through narrative – how people talk about crime, using a qualitative approach, can greatly enhance our knowledge about rural crime. Additionally, studying rural crime talk goes beyond crime and can be utilized to examine the nature, scope, and scale of how people are involved with the production of safety in the countryside. In this chapter, we outline the use of “crime talk” as a research method to examine rural crime as well as rural security and safety, drawing our observations from our experience of working with rural communities in Ireland. After the general presentation of crime-talk as a qualitative approach to collecting data in the countryside, we offer a practical application based on our experience drawn from two case studies of community safety in rural Ireland. We report challenges we encountered and discuss some of the ways of overcoming them.
