ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 describes the research design, site and methods used in the research behind the book. It explores the history of HMP Whitemoor and its segregation unit. It draws out the challenges associated with researching two, often polarised, groups. The chapter closes by exploring four challenges which arose from researching at the margins of the worlds of both prisoners and staff. In particular, the chapter confronts the ethical and practical difficulties relating to: maintaining trust and mitigating suspicion of participants; being able to truly understand their worlds; retaining a researcher’s sense of ‘self’; and how researchers grapple with ‘ethnographic loneliness’ which can arise in prison fieldwork.
