Biographical studies of prisoners’ families. Methodological notes

Abstract

The article deals with the life situation of the families of prisoners, in particular, parental relationships connected with the experience of incarceration in a correctional institution. During the realisation of the research I noticed many difficulties in finding contact with potential interlocutors, therefore I considered the families of prisoners as an environment “invisible in the research field”. In addition, I defined families of prisoners as marginalised and stigmatised environments. The main aim of the article is to show selected methodological dilemmas that can be encountered through the design and analysis of biographical research of family members of prisoners. The theoretical introduction of the paper as an extended definition of the penitentiary crisis allowed to characterise the dominant trends and directions of research on prisoners’ families. Further, it focused on selected problems of realisation of qualitative research (especially biographical research). I analyse the literature and present my own methodological approach based on the direction of interpretative sociology. Using the potential of the autobiographical narrative interview technique (of the German sociological school of Fritz Schütze), I collected 31 interviews with adult children of prisoners and 30 interviews with parents of prisoners. Finally, I refer to my own research experience and discuss the “usefulness and ineffectiveness” of an autobiographical narrative interview. Moreover, I characterise key reflections on the role of the researcher in obtaining autobiographical narrations. The article is an invitation to discuss the improvement of research procedures, especially in the area of research on family members of persons in prisons.