The Shifting Legitimacy of Knowledge Across Academic and Police/Practitioner Settings: Highlighting the Risks and Limits of Reflexivity

Abstract

The value of reflexivity is now largely accepted by qualitative researchers (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2011; Lumsden and Winter 2014), and has helped to address the sanitized nature of research accounts typically featured in methods textbooks. Although criminology has a less prominent legacy of producing ‘reflexive accounts’ than in sociology or anthropology for instance, recent publications such as this edited volume, the chapters in Lumsden and Winter’s (2014) Reflexivity in Criminological Research, and the writings of others such as Jupp et al. (2000), Jewkes (2012) and Liebling (1999), demonstrate the growing recognition amongst criminologists of the value of reflexivity, in addition to feminist criminologies (Gelsthorpe 1990). Reflexive accounts can also be found in classic sociological studies of crime and deviance, which highlight the dangers faced in the field, and questions of research ethics (Whyte 1943; Polsky 1967; Adler 1993[1985]; Hobbs 1988). Reflexivity is valuable in that it draws attention to the researcher as part of the world being studied, while reminding us that those individuals involved in our research are ‘subjects’, not ‘objects’ (Lumsden and Winter 2014). By being reflexive we acknowledge that social researchers cannot be separated from their autobiographies and will ‘bring their own values to the research and their interpretation of the data’ (Devine and Heath 1999: 27).