The Pains of Doing Criminological Research (Criminological Studies)

By explicitly focusing on the lived experiences of criminology researchers and giving voice to their difficulties, struggles, frustrations, and the challenges they meet during their research, this book places the researcher in the center of the attention, providing a unique perspective to the classical handbook in research methods. These tales of the field witnesses relate the hidden difficulties and pitfalls of doing research and discuss often-neglected questions. What does it mean to do research in a hypermasculine environment as a prison? What are the challenges to getting access to a police organization or to private intelligence organizations and private security companies? How does a researcher cope with her or his own emotions during fieldwork? How does an ex-convict experience the process of becoming a researcher? What are the hidden or unexpected problems of publishing? What are the challenges of doing comparative research? These are only a few questions that are dealt with in this book, which is written by researchers for researchers and students of criminology.