Interviewing Elites, Experts and the Powerful in Criminology [Hardcover]

This book offers practical advice on designing, conducting and analyzing interviews with elite and expert persons (or socially prominent actors), with a focus on criminology and criminal justice. It offers dilemmas and examples of good and bad practices in order to encourage readers to critically asses their own work. It also addresses methodological issues which include: access, power imbalances, getting past corporate answers, considerations of whether or not it is at times acceptable to ask leading questions and whether to enter a discussion with a respondent at all. This book will be valuable to students and scholars conducting qualitative research.

 1. Introduction.- 2. Interviewing The Powerful In Crime And Crime Control.- 3. Interview Models And Researchers Self-Positioning.- 4. Their Reign, Their Game? Accessing The Powerful.- 5. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.- 6. Conducting The Interview.- 7. Making Sense Of The Data.

The handbook provides exceptional strategies, recommendations, and guidelines for researchers who seek to conduct interviews with the powerful. & This handbook is appropriate for a large audience including graduate students and all researchers/professors who seek to conduct quality qualitative analysis with powerful actors in a variety of disciplines. Overall, this book is exceptional, and I highly recommend it to those in the criminal justice field. (Megan J. Parker, Crime Law and Social Change, June 23, 2020)

The book is particularly useful for those preparing for fieldwork who are not planning to study the kind of people the penal system is designed to detect, judge and lock up  the kind of people criminology is designed to study. (Ignacio Gonz?lez-S?nchez, European Journal of Probation, May 13, 2020)