How to Deal with “Doing Social Inequality” by “Doing Criminological (Qualitative) Research”

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.