SAGE Journal Articles
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In this study, the effect that the sex offender registry has had on female sex offenders in two states is explored. In-depth personal interviews were conducted with nine registered female sex offenders from Illinois and Texas. Questions were asked about the arrest that led to registration and the effect that sex offender registration statutes have had on their lives. Braithwaite's crime, shame, and reintegration theory was relied on to assess the extent to which the processes described in his theory occurred in this sample. The focus of many of the questions included whether the women were able to reintegrate into their communities or if they were stigmatized. It was found that every respondent reported at least one negative effect on her life as a result of being identified on the public registry. Also, many of the stigmatization processes described by Braithwaite were applicable to the interviewed women.
Objectives: The current study contributes to the literature through a systematic social observation of the defensive actions of drug sellers within open-air retail markets. The study expands upon previous literature by incorporating a novel data collection and coding method.
Methods: Video footage of narcotics transactions was extracted from the closed-circuit television (CCTV) system of the Newark, NJ Police Department. Researchers transcribed and coded the footage to measure the frequency of defensive actions incorporated by drug sellers. Fisher’s exact tests measured whether the frequency of each defensive action significantly differed across geographic setting or time of day.
Results: The frequency of many defensive actions was significantly related to geographic setting and time of day. The strongest relationship was observed between the use of stash spots and setting. Overall, the findings suggest that drug sellers adopt tenets of Opportunity Theory to protect themselves from law enforcement, specifically by acting as guardians and place managers on their own behalf.
Conclusions: This study extends prior techniques and provides an additional case study on the use of CCTV footage in the study of street-level crime. This methodology can be used in concert with more traditional ethnographic techniques in the study of the drug trade and in crime-and-place research in general.
This article provides a discussion on the question of validity in qualitative evaluation. Although validity in qualitative inquiry has been widely reflected upon in the methodological literature (and is still often subject of debate), the link with evaluation research is underexplored. Elaborating on epistemological and theoretical conceptualizations by Guba and Lincoln and Creswell and Miller, the article explores aspects of validity of qualitative research with the explicit objective of connecting them with aspects of evaluation in social policy. It argues that different purposes of qualitative evaluations can be linked with different scientific paradigms and perspectives, thus transcending unproductive paradigmatic divisions as well as providing a flexible yet rigorous validity framework for researchers and reviewers of qualitative evaluations.
Concerns with the issues of validity in qualitative research have dramatically increased. Traditionally, validity in qualitative research involved determining the degree to which researchers’ claims about knowledge corresponded to the reality (or research participants’ construction of reality) being studied. The authors note that recent trends have shown the emergence of two quite different approaches to the validity question within the literature on qualitative research. The authors categorize and label these ‘transactional’ validity and ‘transformational’ validity. While useful, the authors assert that neither approach is sufficient to meet the current needs of the field. The authors propose a recursive, process-oriented view of validity as an alternative framework.