Researching Crime and Justice by Louise Westmarland

Author:Louise Westmarland [Westmarland, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781136776304
Google: MMGsAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-03-01T03:43:27+00:00

Mixed methods

In the following interview Sandra Walklate points out the benefits of mixed methods. She explains the background and experiences from her project, which was funded as part of an ESRC programme conducted between 1994 and 1996. She has published, with co-authors, several papers and articles drawn from the project (see Evans et al. 1996, for example).

Interview with Sandra Walklate: the fear of crime debate

I should say something about what we were really concerned with. It was particularly the fear of crime debate, as it was then, and what we were trying to do was to unpick how it was in two small areas, two wards in fact – Oldtown and Bankhill, similar, working class, primarily white – and compare them.

When we started the project we always proposed a kind of mixed methodology – that was always in the game plan, because as a team that was what we were committed to and we felt at the time to get the funding we had to put a survey bit in there, a quantitative bit. So we did plan on doing our own version of a crime survey and we did borrow a lot from the British Crime Survey questions, but it was always planned as a longitudinal study. It was a two-and-a-half-year project so it was quite interesting from that respect, and it was always going to be a mixed method because what we wanted was to get a feel for, across the board, about how people were living with, managing and responding to crime. So it always included talking to community groups, residents, police officers, the professionals, the whole kit and caboodle.

That was the plan, and as the project unfolded – the first six months was about familiarisation in the areas – the two full-time researchers on the project spent time just hanging about places, going to the pubs, going to community forum meetings, just being seen around the areas. One of the first things we did as a team was to be taken on a walkabout by one of the community police officers, who was plain clothes, worked under cover, particularly in Oldtown. He took us on a walk around the area really early in the morning so nobody would see us out with the police, so that in his terms, the local ‘scallies’ wouldn't see us as associated with him. That was a really informative way of getting a feel for how the police thought, on the ground, about this particular location, and we did the same in the other area as well, with their equivalent officer, because they were actually policed quite differently, as we learned during the first six months.

So the first six months was about embedding, getting faces known in the location; it was also about refining the research tools and so on, training up people who were going to interview. It's kind of one of those happenstance things where it was luck we did that, because during that six months the Home Office had a survey team out there doing door-to-door interviews on intimidation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.