The Qualitative Study of Juvenile Offenders

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Table of Contents

The Methodology in Brief
Data Recording
Data Analysis
References

All responsible justice and penal administration officials ponder the question of the effectiveness of incarceration as the prime deterrent to crime. After all, a prior submission for this dissertation quoted Visher (2007) as reporting on the dismal outcomes: the recidivism rate has held steady throughout the late 1990s and the first half of this decade: two in three released offenders are rearrested, more than half within the three years cut-off used for defining recidivism. This is not to argue that parole, community service, halfway houses or restorative justice should displace either mainstream prisons or juvenile justice institutions (JJIs)completely. Rather, the central research question posed by this dissertation is:

How can juvenile prison programs be improved to ensure that young offenders are re-integrated successfully into their communities and recidivism is therefore minimized, if not eliminated?

This study evidently falls under the applied qualitative research typology of inquiry purposes. Presenting findings to a primary audience of policymakers puts a premium on relevance, clarity, practicality and applicability of the findings (Patton, 2002).

For this research question to be actionable at all, it must be shown that former inmates of the Connecticut JJI in question:

Can discern whether the current combination of sports, education and counseling has been explicitly helpful in reforming them and keeping them away from re-offending.
If not, former inmates may have suggestions about other more effective interventions or provide helpful cues based on the rationale they give for re-offending subsequent to release from the Connecticut JJI.
Sympathetic prompting in a qualitative research context may reveal the prevalence of such aggravating factors (for recidivism) as inmate assault or rape which the correctional institution had no official knowledge about. If theory holds about such incidents debasing the self-worth of juvenile inmates and increasing the risk of re-offending, then more stringent facility security may be called for.
Finally, that qualitative research can surface such risk factors as poverty, early gang affiliation and continuing maltreatment at home as antecedents for the offense that resulted in confinement at the JJI.

The Methodology in Brief

So far, a search of the literature has yielded no similar attempt to assess the effectiveness of juvenile correction facilities from the viewpoint of released inmates who may or may not re-offend. Given the broad scope of the above explanatory factors and the possibility that other unanticipated variables may be at work, one obviously has no guarantees that a comprehensive quantitative survey form can be formulated. Nor does the researcher have a solid basis for confidence that questionnaire items can be formulated validly, i.e. measuring with precision the opinions released offenders have about their rehabilitation experience in the JJI. For these two reasons alone, the study must opt towards an exploratory and qualitative approach.

As ethnographic qualitative research, the primary research for this dissertation may involve either in-depth individual interviews or focus group discussions (or both). The unique benefit of the focus group technique essentially lies in the dynamic of group interaction, ordinarily a stimulus for uncovering a greater range of feelings, attitudes, motivations, insights and perceptions than one might stimulate from the same number of individual interviews. In that sense, focus groups are more productive and save fieldwork time (Krueger and Casey, 2000).

At this time, the primary research plan calls for 20 in-depth interviews with respondents recruited by purposive sampling so as to obtain a suitable mix as to gender, social class, ethnicity, prior gang membership, and living with both parents or a single parent in a dysfunctional household prior to incarceration. The alternative plan involves assembling two focus groups, one each for males and females owing to concerns that may be distinctive by gender.

Data Recording

As described in prior submissions, the largely unstructured responses yielded by either depth interviews or focus groups are recorded in three ways. The researcher-analyst makes notes during the proceedings concerning non-verbal behavior (that strengthens or weakens the validity of what is said) and spot impressions about cause-effect relationships. Digital audio or videotape is used to capture verbal responses verbatim to enable review and alternative interpretation. Finally, the tapes are transcribed and subjected to either manual or computer-aided content analysis.

Data Analysis

The fundamental step in analysis of qualitative data is to set up the proper coding framework and coding list so that the obviously disparate verbatim responses can be organized into conveniently short range of data classes. Obviously, the first-level categories of the coding frame can be pre-determined based on the hypothesized explanatory variables: a) Evaluation of present correctional-facility interventions and perceived effectiveness; b) Suggestions about other interventions or cues for programming new ones; c) aggravating or risk factors inherent in the prison environment; d) Early-life risk factors like poverty, early gang affiliation and continuing maltreatment at home.

Whether done completely manually by the researcher fully cognizant of the meaning of the verbatim responses or assisted by Computer Aided Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) tools, the first data analysis is most laborious but also the most critical to organizing qualitative research data into meaningful information. The first requirement of a complete range of data classes is mostly satisfied by the hypothesized factors listed in the prior paragraph. In the second stage, the training, professional experience, resultant skills, insights and capabilities of the researcher are all invaluable for following the guideline that the listing of sub-category variables should be mutually exclusive. Then synthesis as process becomes possible (Patton, 2002).

At both levels, the researcher as coder may opt to tentatively list unexpected verbatims under an “Others” section at the bottom of the code frame until they add up to some sizeable frequency. In the case of a sample of twenty subjects, a threshold level of just three respondents could be sufficient to move the response from “Others” and create a new, first- or second-level data class.

Two CAQDAS programs that can be explored are NVivo 7 and Atlas-ti. Aside from having enough artificial intelligence to create codes from plain English text, both programs are invaluable to the qualitative researcher for being able to maintain the database, search the archive to enable re-analysis, create relational networks, and associate verbatim quotes with data classes or families (Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, 2008).

Once the data classes have been set up, straightforward frequency tables can be constructed and non-parametric statistics employed to test for differences between the hypothesized independent variables. Recall that this study effectively seeks to explain just two dependent variables: satisfaction with JJI interventions and recidivism. Since the normal assumptions about normality of distribution and homogeneity of variance will obviously not apply to the data output after first-stage analysis, the applicable counterpart to Student’s t test is the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (East Carolina University, 2009).

References

Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, Manchester Metropolitan University (2008). Tools to help manage data: Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis. Web.

East Carolina University (2009). Nonparametric statistics. Web.

Krueger, R. A. & Casey, M. A. (2000). Focus groups: a practical guide for applied research. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Visher, C. A. (2007). Returning home: Emerging findings and policy lessons about prisoner reentry. Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 20 (2) pp. 93–102.

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The Qualitative Study of Juvenile Offenders

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