Abstract
While most social scientists agree that the outcome of research should be useful in the real world, the idea that research can, and should, be empowering and directly useful to research participants has largely been limited to the margins of a few social science disciplines. While community psychologists and critical sociologists have long embraced participatory research and co-operative inquiry approaches—where the empowerment of research participants is as important as the contribution to knowledge and policy development—criminologists have been slow to adopt more emancipatory research models except for a few notable exceptions. This essay calls for the use of participatory action research by criminologists and for us to have a dialogue about the social value of our research and our obligations to research participants beyond “simply doing no harm.”
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Notes
I am acutely aware that low-income minority women’s voices are frequently excluded from public discourse, and that when they are represented, they are often stereotyped or demonized. See Allard’s discussion on racial stereotypes of black women as the shrill, nagging, aggressive Sapphire; wanton, libidinous shameless Jezebel; or the invincible, manly Sojourner Truth (Allard 1991). Similarly, West warns against the tendency of characterizing African American battered women as tough and resilient thereby denying the anguish of black battered women (West 1999).
Since I chose to interview survivors of domestic violence for safety reasons, most of the women were in their thirties and early forties by the time I spoke to them.
The war on drugs, waged primarily in low-income minority communities, has disproportionately impacted black women of color. In 2006, African American women made up 48% of prisoners in New York State facilities, compared with 24% Latinas and 28% whites (New York State Department of Correctional Services 2006).
The women who are at greatest risk of abuse are demographically similar to women at risk of HIV infection (Cohen et al. 2000). Low-income African American women are disproportionately represented: the rate of HIV infection among African-American women in New York is more than 27 times higher than that of white women of all AIDS cases among women (New York State AIDS Advisory Council 2005). A study investigating risk factors for HIV infection found that when controlling for income, race did not appear to be a specific risk factor for HIV, however, poverty and exposure to early and chronic violence are among the best predictors of HIV infection (Wyatt et al. 2002, p. 66).
Some social scientists express concern over the “policy-relevant” turn in research (see Garvin and Lee 2003). The authors contend that one danger of doing research with the goal of influencing policy is the expansion of the role of researcher to one of activist and policy influencer. Taking a political stand runs counter to the traditional assumption of clinical dissociation in social science.
It is very unusual for criminologists to study the “powerful”. Like the rest of society, we are accustomed to regarding the crimes of the lower-classes as more severe and dangerous than those of the powerful. As Reiman argues, this may not be the case if we take into account all of the avoidable deaths attributable to harmful work conditions, unnecessary surgeries, and exposure to dangerous toxins (Reiman 2006). Another reason for the focus on lower-class crime and victimization is the inaccessibility of research participants from more racially and economically privileged backgrounds. For example, recruiting higher income battered women would have been incredibly difficult. Higher income women are not accustomed to being studied, are rarely enticed by financial compensation, and tend to seek help from private physicians, therapists, and lawyers who are reluctant to share information about and deny access to their clients.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stamford University. The study was about the effect of captivity on both prisoners and guards, but the experiment soon became synonymous with unethical treatment of research subjects when some of the “guards” started to act sadistically toward some of the “prisoners” (Musen and Zimbardo 1991).
Community research is a model that employs participatory methods where the community collaborates in the design, data collection, dissemination, and implementation of research (Serrano-Garcia 1990).
“Critical subjectivity” is a type of validity that “rests on a collaborative encounter with experience” (Reason 1994, p. 327). It requires highly critical, self-aware, discriminating, and informed judgments of the co-researchers (Reason and Rowan 1981). “Critical subjectivity means that we do not suppress our primary subjective experience, that we accept that our knowing is from a perspective; it also means that we are aware of that perspective and of its bias, and we articulate it in our communications” (Reason 1994, p. 327).
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Dupont, I. Beyond Doing No Harm: A Call for Participatory Action Research with Marginalized Populations in Criminological Research. Crit Crim 16, 197–207 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-008-9055-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-008-9055-7