Abstract
Criminological research is a challenging field in many ways. The discipline criticizes the labeling carried out by the criminal justice system, which marks certain groups of people as “deviant,” “criminal,” or “dangerous.” Nevertheless, criminological studies often fall into the same trap. By relying on labels that the criminal justice system has applied when accessing the field through prisons, probation officers, or other kinds of support systems for offenders, sampling and labeling are intertwined. This article scrutinizes how qualitative reconstructive research supports and reproduces social inequality. It applies the concept of “doing social problems” and emphasizes a constructionist point of view. Furthermore, we review the sampling mechanisms of recent studies: What concepts of “social problems” do we see? What world does the criminological research at hand reconstruct? In our conclusion, we call for a sensitive approach and a broad discussion of possibilities and limitations. To us, qualitative reconstructive research – in fact – seems to offer some solutions for making the processes of labeling visible. We ask how social knowledge systems concerning crime and deviance are constituted and how we, as criminologists, contribute to them through our research practice.
We would like to thank Nadine Jukschat for her time and discourse on this article. We would also like to thank Nivene Raafat for proofreading an earlier version of this manuscript. Moreover, we want to extend our gratitude to Rita Faria and Mary Dodge for their helpful comments.
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Notes
- 1.
We refer with the term “doing inequaliy” to the ethnometodological approach of “doing gender” by Garfinkel (1967), which was later further conceptualized by Kessler and McKenna (1978) with reference to the interactionist and dramaturgical approach by Goffman. In criminology, Messerschmidt (1995) has made a significant contribution to the relationsship between “doing gender” and crime.
- 2.
The same would be true for people who do not identify as man or woman or who identify as transgender. But empirical research into this is yet missing.
- 3.
For a summary of theoretical issues in the study of social problems, see Best (2004).
- 4.
Particularly radical representatives of this approach see social problems exclusively as social constructions formed by discourses (Spector & Kitsuse, 1977).
- 5.
This approach has several different names, that is, control paradigm, reaction approach, definition approach, labeling theory.
- 6.
- 7.
For a historical overview of the overlapping developments of interpretivist and constructionist theories regarding the sociology of deviance, see Nichols (2019). Although the sociology of social problems in the international arena has gained a constructivist strand through Kitsuse and Spector (1977), the otherwise far-reaching work of Berger and Luckmann (1967) on the sociology of knowledge has hardly been received (Keller & Poferl, 2020, p. 143).
- 8.
In the English-speaking world in particular, the sociology of knowledge is linked to feminist and postcolonial approaches to “situatedness” (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 2003; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) and its connection to the Marxist tradition of “Seinsgebundenheit” or “materiality,” which means being determined by social being in a strictly determinist meaning (Keller & Poferl, 2020, p. 143).
- 9.
Translation by Katharina Leimbach.
- 10.
Translation by Nicole Bögelein.
- 11.
Translation by Nivene Raafat.
- 12.
There are other approaches to include marginalized voices into the debate. O’Neill (2017, p. 91) suggests participatory research that include the taking of pictures, walking. She states that especially in research on humans who seek for asylum, “[w]alking and biographical methods together with visual methods helped to explore the experience of ‘being in place’ (…) eliciting dialogue, biographical remembering and relational, embodied engagement.”
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Leimbach, K., Bögelein, N. (2023). How to Deal with “Doing Social Inequality” by “Doing Criminological (Qualitative) Research”. In: Faria, R., Dodge, M. (eds) Qualitative Research in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_10
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