Issues with Sampling Techniques Employed

Multi-method procedures were used to select various components of the sample. This was necessitated by the various situational contexts which prohibited the consistent application of any one sampling technique across all the sub-samples. One advantage of this was that it allowed the researcher to better access hard-to-reach populations. It also helped to maximise variation in perspectives. However in cases where snowball sampling was used to recruit ex-

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prisoners within the community, it could be argued that these were individuals who were the most visible members of the targeted sub-population.

Furthermore, by seeking to represent a range of perspectives related to the reintegration phenomenon it could also be argued that the purposive sampling technique that was used to select the main sample, could have been more systematically applied. This is true but it should be noted that the same factors which militated against the drawing of a random sample did not allow a multi-stage or stratified maximum variation (see Patton 1990) sampling procedure to be adopted. The sample is unavoidably unrepresentative of the general research population. Therefore much care was taken to maintain awareness of potential sources of bias in seeking to analyse and report on key research findings. However women who were

interviewed represented 93 per cent of the total female prison recidivism population. Even then much thought was given to drawing tentative conclusions from the results of this inclusive dataset.

Overall, opportunities to introduce researcher bias (when developing the research

instruments, selecting participants and analysing and interpreting the data) were minimised through adopting a mixed methods reflexive approach (see Lawlor 2002; Creswell 2007). Therefore whilst I attempted to suspend any personal judgments about the social worlds of ex-prisoners in the study I was also conscious that the process and outcomes of the research might have been influenced by my identity as a young, black, female Jamaican-born student. The chapter will now consider briefly whether the relationship between participants and the researcher may have affected the analytic quality of the data.

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Throughout this chapter I have in some sense challenged the dichotomisation of the ‘outsider versus insider’ binary. For example, being Jamaican meant that I could identify with many of the general cultural experiences of participants. By contrast I knew nothing of the experience say of being an elderly male deportee forced to leave everything including his family in what was ‘his home country’ and return to a strange place which was the land of his birth. I

therefore held both an outsider/insider status meaning that as the situation arose (in fieldwork and analysis) I sought to reflexively optimise either position to generate interpretive

purchase. I will now comment further on relational aspects in terms of my gender and age and how this may have affected the richness and quality of the data:

4.6.1.1 Gender

Arguably, being a woman I believe made me particularly sensitive to the experiences and concerns of female participants. However, I was keen to explore male and female issues in relation to reintegration and Chapter 6 reveals the often different effects of incarceration upon men and women in the correctional system. In exploring these effects I was careful not to exclude men from topics that may be deemed in Caribbean culture to be traditionally female spheres of interest. An example of this was the fate of children. The highly gendered views of participants revealed some very different assumptions about responsibility for the care of children as later chapters indicate.

Overall, males seemed more willing to participate in the study and open up about their life stories from the onset of the interview. The men in the sample were serving much longer sentences than women and perhaps had come to the conclusion that their long-term

incarceration left them little to hide in terms of their criminal status and associated stigma. By contrast, women appeared to be, initially at least, more reticent about sharing stories of their

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lives and offending history. Most women were serving shorter sentences and some could pass off their absence from the community (and imprisonment) as a trip overseas. In this sense, women might see prison and its stigma as temporary and bounded and wish to minimise exposure of their criminal status to both themselves and outsiders such as a researcher. Some women expressed concerns about the researcher judging them without having shared their experiences and having been more fortunate than themselves in being able to make the right life choices. In such instances, being able to reassure these women in their local dialect that I was non-judgemental helped to dispel some of their reservations.

The willingness of men to speak more freely may also have had something to do with sexual identity in that I was often asked about my marital status and complimented on my

appearance. The usual comments of male inmates ran along the lines that they were delighted to be sitting and talking to a “beautiful intelligent lady” rather than lying in their prison cells doing nothing. Their uninvited and unwarranted flattery placed the researcher in a delicate position of setting boundaries at the start of the interview and not being censorious or roughly rejecting when comments during the interview were sometimes inappropriate in seeking to move the discussion towards a more intimate engagement. Such events often spoke to the absence of females in their lives that they considered would have helped them desist from crime. The claim - “if I had someone like you in my life I would not have ended up in prison” was not uncommon in male prisoner interviews. Such matters of prosocial influences that promote reintegration are addressed in Chapter 7.

4.6.1.2 Age

Few inmates were at the start of their criminal careers and nearly all had been to prison on two or more occasions. However, the advantage of this from a research perspective was that

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they were able to share their experiences as children, youth and adults and reflect on the trajectories that had over time led them to repeat offending. The age differences between the research in her twenties and many interviewees in the middle years and older did bear upon the research relationship. Participants often chose to position me in some filial context whereby they felt some desire to assist me in my ambitions as any older relative might. Male and female prisoners often said some variation of “…you could have been my daughter and so I want to see you do well”. Thus in some cases a generational effect seemed to encourage a more open and reflective participation by interviewees. Youth who had been to prison on more than one occasion were a minority in the sample and for that reason were interesting cases in which it was possible to draw upon a more recent cultural and social history familiar to both researcher and inmate. Such age-related aspects come to prominence next in Chapter 5, the first of four findings chapters, which considers issues of situational crime prevention with regard to matters of age, gender, social ties and communal resources.

4.7 Conclusion

To conclude, ensuring that the analysis and recommendations which derived from this study were based on an ethical and methodologically secure foundation involved maintaining a robust research audit trail, and which has been outlined in this chapter. Within the English- speaking Caribbean, reintegration is an intriguing yet neglected area of research interest. Therefore ambitions to pursue this interest should be based on an awareness that even a modest corpus of data possesses potential to provide useful insight into the phenomenon and the social contexts in which it is nested. It is hoped this will become evident in the findings chapters which now follow.

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Chapter 5: Enablers of Ineffective