Qualitative Methods and Interpersonal Citizen-State Encounters: Interpreting Policing in the United States

Abstract

The heart of the citizen-state encounter is the interpersonal interaction, and quantitative methods alone cannot fully capture its nuances. The interpersonal citizen-state encounter entails emotions, antecedents, and perspectives that inform present interactions and require interpretation, all hallmarks of qualitative methods. To demonstrate the complexity of the citizen-state encounter and the necessity of listening to interpret interactions, I examine how historical antecedents of African Americans’ encounters with police can create intergenerational socialization into police distrust that informs how police are seen today. Myriad influences enter police interactions, including the knowledge of continuous racism in police history. Administrators untrained in qualitative methods will not be able to appropriately listen and interpret. This project initially planned to explore symbolic representation in policing but, over its course, it became clear that history influenced how respondents viewed police, further highlighting the importance of listening.

Keywords:

• Qualitative
• interview
• experience
• feeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This manuscript uses the terms African American and Black interchangeably throughout to refer to people with dark skin in the United States with a sociocultural connection to specific historical racism in the United States (Williams, 2003; Wu, 2014). A dark-skinned person in the United States may be subject to inequitable criminal justice systems regardless of their country of origin—for example, a dark-skinned Nigerian immigrant in the United States or a dark-skinned United States’ native might have preferences for one term or the other, and both may be in contexts where they are subject to similar inequitable criminal justice regimes. This is further complicated by the socially constructed nature of race, within which self-identification, social identification, and combinations of the two might have separate social consequences. This research discusses how knowledge of and socialization into specific historically patterned racism in the United States influences perceptions of police, and when either Black or African American is used, in this context it will refer to people who have a sociocultural connection to historical racism in the United States such that they can have their perceptions influenced by it.