ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the methodology of the study. Greater Manchester is a large metropolitan area. The Beswick and Clayton area had experienced a decrease in its population since 1981 of 5 per cent. Probation areas were recruited into the study in a number of ways. Some probation services had existing contracts with the Probation Studies Unit at Oxford University’s Centre for Criminological Research and were asked if they would be prepared to become involved in the ‘Tracking’ project. The longitudinal nature of the project and the desire to record both officers’ and probationers’ opinions meant that it was not feasible to recruit a large sample of cases. The reporting of attrition rates is somewhat complicated by the fact that probationers were serving orders of varying lengths, and therefore not all needed to be interviewed during the final sweep of interviewing. Individual sweeps never achieved less than a 60 per cent response rate.
