The methodological challenges of exploring questions of ethnic disproportionality within youth justice

• In Event: Juvenile Justice 4. Novel Approaches in Juvenile Justice

Abstract

This paper reflects on the methodological implications of current research into the relationship between ethnicity, disproportionality and diversion in the youth justice system in England and Wales. It draws on emerging findings from a national study focusing on processes of decision making that inform whether young people receive formal sanctions or are diverted out of the system.

There is an extensive methodological literature examining interviewer/interviewee dynamics, variously within positivist, feminist and intersectional frames but sharing a concern with the effects of interviewer characteristics on the research process and experience. This paper takes a sideways step from this, focusing specifically on the researcher experience of undertaking qualitative research interviews with youth justice practitioners and other professionals. These interviews focus on the significance of ethnicity in decision making processes relating to young people in the youth justice system, and have presented the research team with several challenges, expected and unexpected. A core issue has been how best to open these conversations and to create a space where participants feel able to reflect on individual practice, local systems, and reflect on questions of inequalities and bias. The paper will argue that engagement with these thorny issues is essential in evaluating the quality of evidence emerging from the project, but more crucially in understanding the lack of progress regarding disproportionality within the youth justice system.

Authors

• Anne-Marie Day, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Joseph Alexander Kiff, University of Bedfordshire

• Isabelle Brodie, University of Bedfordshire

• John Pitts, University of Bedfordshire

• Timi Osidipe, University of Bedfordshire