Researching legal decision-making, outcomes and impacts: Methodological and Ethical reflections from legal ethnographic studies

• In Event: Qualitative research methods into dialogue

Abstract

Criminologists and socio-legal scholars are adopting increasingly diverse methods—including courtroom ethnography and other spatial or sensorial approaches—to explore legal processes and decision-making. These shifts reflect important shifts within our field towards seeing ‘justice’ not as impartial and fixed, but as contested and negotiated—and therefore also seeing settings like courtrooms as key sites of meaning-making. However, I contend that this diversity of methods necessitates fresh conversations about their epistemological foundations, methodological workings as well as their ethics. Epistemologically, we must consider how observational or spatial methods ‘fit’ alongside other qualitative methods—notably interviews. Methodologically, they raise new questions around access to sites or participants, navigating insider/outsider status, and negotiating trust, informed consent and participation. Ethically, we must also consider the extent to which we should be exposed to sensitive court proceedings, and how this exposure might aggravate harm. By exploring these questions through the lens of my recently completed doctoral fieldwork, I make a case for methodological diversity not just across our discipline, but within individual research projects also. This diversity is what affords researchers insight into the spoken and unspoken bases of legal outcomes, how they are experienced or remembered by participants in the legal process, and how they might reproduce marginalisation beyond the legal encounter.  

Author

• Mark Yin, University of Cambridge