Critical Qualitative Theory: Opening up the Black Box of Criminal Justice Interventions

Abstract

There has been an increasing realisation within government circles that gaining insight into how and why an intervention works or does not is as important as measuring any change that it brings about. Without understanding the mechanisms for change, ensuring that the intervention is effective when transposed to different contexts can be highly challenging. However, while the need for high-quality, robust qualitative research is recognised, the theoretical and methodological tools available to researchers within the field have not kept up. Government-commissioned evaluation requires a methodology that provides genuine insight into how policy and interventions work on the ground and findings that can be generalised beyond the specific samples upon which they are based. In order to fill this conceptual gap, NatCen Social Research has developed an approach to qualitative research that draws on a wide range of existing traditions but that is robust and coherent enough to meet the needs of CJS evaluations. Recent work has led to a new articulation of this approach and a new moniker, ‘critical qualitative theory’ or CQT. This chapter describes the key tenets of CQT and draws on three of published studies of interventions that are focused on or relate to the criminal justice system to illustrate the methodological advantages the approach brings. In particular, the chapter explores the different approaches taken by the authors to the issues of generalisability, the balance between inductive and deductive procedures and how they have approached analysing the data at a case and a theme level. The implication of the different theoretical and methodological choices made by the authors is then discussed in terms of the nature and quality of the authors’ analysis.

Citation

Barnard, M. (2012), "Critical Qualitative Theory: Opening up the Black Box of Criminal Justice Interventions", Bowen, E. and Brown, S. (Ed.) Perspectives on Evaluating Criminal Justice and Corrections (Advances in Program Evaluation, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 129-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1474-7863(2012)0000013010