Becoming a Nonexpert and Other Strategies for Managing Fieldwork Dilemmas in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

In this article, the author presents three fieldwork strategies for managing role conflict in criminal justice settings. One of the most critical issues for ethnographers immersed in fieldwork is balancing the tension between the researcher and participant-observation roles. Ethnographers in criminal justice settings as well as other types of street-level bureaucracies are commonly confronted with dilemmas involving physical risk, highly sensitive data, marginalized clientele, and the exploitive use of power and domination by institutional gatekeepers. Researchers venturing into challenging fieldwork settings, such as criminal justice environments, must be highly attuned to the constraints and opportunities for collecting data. The author argues that these strategies can augment ethnographers' “data collection toolkit” to better address fieldwork problems. In addition, deploying these strategies can help to reveal unforeseen findings in the study.