Abstract
Qualitative data offer rich insights into the social world, whether alone or in tandem with statistical analysis. However, qualitative data are costly to collect and analyse. Moreover, it is a commonplace that only a portion of the data so labouriously collected is the subject of final analysis and publication. Secondary analysis is a well-established method in quantitative research and is raising its profile in application to qualitative data. It has a particular part to play when research is on sensitive topics and/or hard-to-reach populations, as in the example considered here. This article contributes to discussion of the potential and constraints of secondary analysis of qualitative data by reporting the outcome of the secondary analysis of a key study in the sociology of prison life, Cohen and Taylor's research on the long-term imprisonment of men in maximum security. The article re-visits Cohen and Taylor's original analysis and demonstrates support for an alternative, if complementary, conceptualisation, using archived data from the original study. Among the methodological issues discussed are the recovery of the context of the original fieldwork and the role of secondary analysis in an incremental approach to knowledge production.
Highlights
Abstract: »Widerstand und Anpassung im Rahmen krimineller Identität: Verwendung der Sekundäranalyse zur Bewertung klassischer Studien zu Kriminalität und Devianz«
In their book Psychological Survival Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor examine adaptation to long-term imprisonment using the case of maximum security prisoners in Durham Prison
The book says little about the crimes the prisoners had committed, or their criminal career up to the point of receiving long sentences. It focuses on the ways the prisoners deal with their situation and depicts them as having a political and at times almost heroic adaptation to long-term imprisonment
Summary
Abstract: »Widerstand und Anpassung im Rahmen krimineller Identität: Verwendung der Sekundäranalyse zur Bewertung klassischer Studien zu Kriminalität und Devianz«. This article contributes to discussion of the potential and constraints of secondary analysis of qualitative data by reporting the outcome of the secondary analysis of a key study in the sociology of prison life, Cohen and Taylor’s research on the long-term imprisonment of men in maximum security. Cohen and Taylor’s focus shifted from modifying existing analyses to accommodate the case of long-term prisoners to ‘looking at the ways in which men in general might react to an extreme situation, a situation which disrupted their normal lives so as to make problematic such everyday matters as time, friendship, privacy, identity, self-consciousness, ageing and physical deterioration’ (ibid., emphasis added) They were approaching this group as examples of men in general rather than as instances of that unusual group of men who have murdered, raped, engaged in terrorism or committed violent robberies. One would find it hard to identify adherence to ideology in some of the accounts in their data of the self-rejecting, isolated and compulsive behaviour of the sex offenders
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