New Qualitative Methods and Critical Research Directions in Crime, Law, and Justice: Editors’ Introduction

The Past: A Return to Qualitative Inquiry

This Special Issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education (JCJE) provides a platform for those interested in understanding, implementing, and developing new qualitative research designs from critical perspectives. We bring together eight articles from preeminent scholars who study crime and justice issues using innovative and insightful analytical frameworks. Broadly, the articles are written to introduce readers to various methods, and in some cases theory, and to provide illustrative examples of how the methods are applied. The result is a dynamic, informative Special Issue that explores provocative approaches and promising designs, including psychological jurisprudence, queer theory, narrative theory, Southern criminology, visual criminology, quantcrit, and post-colonial theory. Moreover, each article explores and/or demonstrates the relevance of the identified method for purposes of advancing and deepening education in criminal justice and criminology.

The current Special Issue emerged when the guest editors recognized a need for a clear discussion of emerging qualitative methods to study crime and justice. In thinking about how to do this, we looked to a previous Special Issue devoted to qualitative methods published in JCJE in 2010. The then Editor-in-Chief of the JCJE (Chris Schreck) commissioned Special Issues devoted to quantitative methods and to qualitative methods. The goal of the Special Issue on qualitative methods was to “to promote the use and understanding of sound qualitative research designs and to encourage their use among those seeking answers to questions about crime and justice” (Copes, 2010, p. 388). To this end, the Issue was a success. According to Scopus, the Special Issue is among the most cited and contains some of the most cited articles in the Journal’s history (e.g. Holt, 2010; Presser, 2010; Sandberg, 2010).

Since the publication of that Special Issue, criminology and criminal justice has experienced a boom in qualitative research (Copes, Beaton, Ayeni, Dabney, & Tewksbury, 2020). Indeed, more articles using various qualitative methods have been published in the top ranked Journals in the field than ever before. Also, more doctoral programs in the field require or offer qualitative methods classes than ever before. We think that one of the driving forces for this growth of qualitative methods is renewed interest in critical perspectives among those who study crime and justice. People embracing queer, feminist, Southern, narrative, and other critical perspectives have advocated for the importance of using qualitative methods. The growing use of qualitative methods from non-traditional perspectives means that there will be a need for those in the field to understand the logic of and philosophy underpinning the methods, how to apply both in their own research, how to evaluate research that employs them, and how to educate and train students in these cutting-edge inquiries into qualitative methods.

The Present: Challenges in Qualitative Analysis and Critical Research

Today, criminologists find themselves in a world were digital technology has become increasingly important to both the structure and function of the justice system and its discrete decision-making processes. These processes extend to definitions of crime and indices of criminal behavior. Indeed, crime control has become a predominantly “datafication” endeavor ( van Dijck, 2014, p. 197; see also, Arrigo, Sellers, & Sostakas, 2020). To put it differently, we now live in a pre-crime society (Zedner, 2007) or an era where “the information civilization” (Zuboff, 2015, p. 75) prevails unimpeded, and operates decidedly as forward-looking and precautionary (McCulloch & Wilson, 2016). Previously, crime was conceived principally as harm or wrongdoing committed by individuals or groups, which was followed by reactive responses from the criminal justice apparatus (e.g. policing, investigation, trial, and punishment; see Arrigo & Sellers, 2021; Ashworth & Zedner, 2015 ). In a pre-crime society, this traditional temporal perspective is shifted to forecast and prevent crime before it occurs through the algorithmic calculation of risk, institutional dataveillance, preemptive policing, crime mapping, crime analytics, and the digital tracking and monitoring of citizens all in the service of securitization (Schuilenburg, 2015).

What this means, then, is that predictive policing, actuarial justice, and surveillance penology are the informational strategies and digital techniques that regulatory institutions deploy to administratively achieve full or hyper-securitization (Arrigo & Sellers, 2021; Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2020). But, such securitization comes at a cost. The spheres and sites of everyday life are increasingly subjected to over-criminalization and over-policing (Haggerty, Wilson, & Smith, 2011) by the burgeoning “cybersurveillance state” (Hu, 2017, p. 161). Within this new reality, the current climate of criminal justice research cripplingly relies on a set of tools that extract (and abstract) human experience through big data collection (Esposti, 2014). These activities predict who we are, or who we might become, by relying on sophisticated algorithms that compute risk and assess threat. Big data enables vast amounts of information to be collected on individuals for the purpose of strategic “life mining” (van Dijck, 2014, p. 198). In doing so, our being is siphoned from large amounts of unstructured data and our humanity is reassembled into quantified “data-doubles” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 607) to be viewed, measured, and sorted according to potential dangerousness or risk. The digital surveillance that permeates our daily lives is reflected in the prevailing quantitative techniques found in criminal justice research. These techniques largely depend on examining the abstracted dynamics of human behavior through bulk data gathering and statistical modeling.

Missing from these contemporary approaches to criminal justice inquiry is the shared meaning-making of human relatedness, and the storied sense-making of social consciousness that are vividly revealed through qualitative research. Everyone has a tale to tell. These accounts cannot be fully captured or computed by data gleaned from online surveys, digital sensor technologies, websites, search engines, or social media platforms. Instead, the drama of everyday life (e.g. Goffman, 1959) requires innovative methods that permit researchers to better conceptualize and decode how social life is performed, narrated, visualized, constructed, and experienced so we may extrapolate deeper significance from the events that shape and steer our lives (Andersen, Ravn, & Thomson, 2020).

Assembled Articles in This Special Issue

Three objectives anchor each of the assembled articles within this Special Issue. The first of these is to showcase innovation in qualitative research methods. The second is to illustrate the utility of applying these methods in specific crime, law, or justice contexts. The third is to explain or highlight the relevance of the methodological novelty for purposes of criminal justice education. How do the assembled articles contained in this Special Issue accomplish these aims?

In their article on computational methods, Luscombe, Duncan, and Walby demonstrate how to qualitatively analyze bulk datasets in criminal justice. The authors propose a multilayered framework to assist in data collection and case sampling. With the assistance of web-scraping algorithms, computational methods detect broad themes and patterns associated within these large datasets, and these trends are then narrowed down into smaller, more discrete subsets of data for in-depth or thick qualitative analysis. To illustrate the approach’s innovation, Luscombe, Duncan, and Walby collect, subset, and analyze three years of news releases from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police website (N = 13,426). The authors’ methodology includes a mix of web-scraping, natural language processing, and critical discourse analysis. To spotlight the educational significance of their work, including the facilitation of secondary data analyses, the authors make all data and code available online through GitHub.

In their article on psychological jurisprudence, Arrigo and Sellers develop a text-based framework for interpreting legal documents (cases and statutes) and psychological findings (clinical reports and assessments). Drawing inspiration from Aristotle on human virtue and relational flourishing and Derrida on the politics of difference, the authors explain how a deconstructionist method makes evident what they term the ethics-of-justice. This text-based reading shows how juridical decisions and therapeutic judgments depend on a set of social meanings and share truths that often remain concealed or silenced in official accounts of crime and disorder, treatment and punishment. The precedential case law discourse on zero tolerance school policy is featured as a way to amplify the innovation. Problematically, State security interests habitually displace student constitutional safeguards. As such, the authors explain that creating a methodological space for accessing and validating these deferred voices informs the process of both reading the law and science and for educating about the same.

In their article on feminist and queer criminology, Panfil, Petersen, Walker, and Wodda review the similarities and differences between these epistemologies. Areas of theoretical and methodological overlap include, among others, research ethics. Areas of divergence include transgender inclusivity within queer criminology and transgender exclusivity inspired by trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERFism). In addition, the authors spotlight sex-positive approaches as found within queer criminology (e.g. decriminalization, harm reduction) and distinguish them from feminist approaches that regard the role of sex and sexuality differently. Finally, Panfil and colleagues explore the radical potential of both epistemologies (e.g. abolitionist scholarship and methodology), noting how such possibilities constitute both theoretical and methodological points of research convergence and divergence. Throughout the commentary and analysis, principles of inclusive pedagogy ground the authors’ thesis.

In his article on narrative criminology, Sandberg details how narrative analysis can be used as a technique to assist in the understanding of crime based on how the story is told. The author presents four different models of doing narrative analysis, including thematic, structural, performative, and dialogical. Sandberg delineates the methodological processes of these distinct approaches, and he accounts for the application of each in an interview with a person who engaged in serious violent offenses. He presents both the strengths and limits of these four forms of narrative analysis and discusses the educational significance of appreciating narrativity (i.e. the role of story-making). This discussion includes the importance of entertaining an audience, establishing identity, delimiting boundaries, and processing and integrating storied and storable (e.g. crime and justice) content.

As qualitative studies in criminology seek to expand the representation and experience of marginalized identity groups in the process and practice of research, these inquiries also need to emphasize the barriers these groups confront in telling their stories. In their article on Southern criminology, Warren and Ryan emphasize an alternative way to conceptualize crime and justice issues that affect subaltern peoples by acknowledging a broader set of communicative forms, including Indigenous storytelling or yarning. The authors rely on two pivotal developments within critical criminological thought to further their argument. First, they outline an epistemology (i.e. theory and method) that challenges mainstream positivist assumptions about knowledge-building. This is an epistemology that decenters and displaces taken-for-granted power relations about gender, race, and class. Second, they describe the considerable absence of Indigenous voices within Australian historical and contemporary inquiries that investigate the linkages among surveillance, order, control, and justice administration. Taken together, Warren and Ryan assert that these developments in critical criminology advance a radical reimagining of otherwise unopposed facts about surveillance in colonized societies. In doing so, the authors propose that these de-colonizing efforts establish an important theoretical and applied space for conducting research on and about Indigenous and non-Indigenous storytelling. The co-research design articulated by Warren and Ryan validates the integral role that subaltern voices assume in the process and practice of enriching intellectual thought, deepening education, and invigorating qualitative methodology.

In their article on photo elicitation interviews (PEIs) Copes and Ragland delineate an innovative methodology with import for critical criminology in particular and for justice studies in general. PEIs are an empowering way to solicit reactions and insights from participants by using photographs or other images as stimuli during interviews. The authors provide a practical, step-by-step guide for conducting this type of research. To demonstrate the significance of the method, Copes and Ragland rely on examples from the photo-ethnography of people who used psychedelics (e.g. peyote) during religious ceremonies. These examples detail the sequence and procedures to follow when designing a project based on PEIs. This includes how to solicit photographs from subjects, how to develop photo kits, how to involve interviewees in the elicitation process, and how to present final products. The authors conclude with a discussion regarding the ethical implications of using this qualitative approach in crime and justice research.

In their analysis of the school push-out (rather than drop-out) experience for Latinx and Black youths, Garcia, Ibarra, Mireles-Rios, Rios, and Maldonado turn to Critical Race Theory (CRT) for methodological and analytical guidance. Relying on data from the California Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Civil Rights Data Collection repository, they provide a descriptive analysis of the school-to-prison pipeline in Southern California that supports and maintains what they term the youth industrial complex. Their description is derived from two critical race methodologies: QuantCrit (quantitative) and Counter-storytelling (qualitative). As the authors explain, these methodologies elucidated the experiences of thirty-nine former high school students who were pushed out of school. Through the activity of counter-storytelling, Garcia et al. contend that these former students were able to speak about and recall how racism, sexism, and classism emerged in their schooling experiences. The authors demonstrate how to use QuantCrit and Counter-storytelling in criminal justice education. They argue that this usage both decenters the youth industrial complex and defies the supposed statistics for Latinx and Black youth. As they conclude, this complex and these statistics reify deficit-based rather than assets-based perspectives embedded within the presumed objectivity of positivist methods.

In their article on race and method, Palmer, Earle, and Phillips investigate the unseen in criminal justice research. The authors argue that current methodological practices in (post)colonial societies – especially including in-depth interviews – tend to conceal race and undermine racial differences through unexamined epistemological assumptions about Whiteness. To advance their perspective, they propose and develop a unique introspective, co-interviewing protocol. Their three, qualitative case study interviews intend to make more explicit how racialized power dynamics cloak individual identity and group differentiated positionality. By interrogating the obscured methodological tools of Whiteness, the authors make more explicit the limitations of existing research where over-represented White researchers typically conduct inquiries involving under-represented minorities who are vulnerable to exclusion, criminalization, and state violence. Parmar et al. conclude by discussing how their non-traditional qualitative method is instructive for students and apprentice researchers. This instruction includes a reflexive pedagogy which connects biography with politics in training the next generation of criminologists.

Back to the Future: Directions in Qualitative Crime and Justice Research

Fundamentally, the assembled articles in this Special Issue direct us to a felt dimension of human experience and of coexistence that has always been central to criminological verstehen (e.g. Ferrell, 1997). This is a dimension of social reality in which dominant culture collides with personal biography. Walzer (2019) makes a similar argument when describing and defending the thickness of our own historical truths that mark, perhaps even stain, the search for justice. But, the historical residue of these lived truths, and this quest for a common justice, can only ever find form and take up residence in the drama of everyday life, including the presentation of our selves (Goffman, 1959). This Special Issue gets underneath the present dilemma in which sustaining our vitalized truths and describing our visceral injustices take center stage as moral engagement. Today, more than ever, the necessity of qualitative research in criminology and criminal justice returns us, and in the process reminds us, what it means to be fully alive and all too human. Educating about such moral engagement is how we get back to the shared project of reclaiming our pluralistic humanity and transforming our collective futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.