Interviewing Elites, Experts and the Powerful in Criminology

Olga Petintseva is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Her expertise is located at the intersection of criminology, migration studies and socio-linguistics.Julie Tieberghien is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Rita Faria is Assistant Professor at the School of Criminology, University of Porto, Portugal. Rita does research in white-collar crime, research misconduct and the use of qualitative methods in Criminology. Yarin Eski is Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Hub Security and Social Resilience of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of Glasgow.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Interviewing ‘The Powerful’ In Crime And Crime Control.- 3. Interview Models And Researcher’s Self-Positioning.- 4. Their Reign, Their Game? Accessing The Powerful.- 5. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.- 6. Conducting The Interview.- 7. Making Sense Of The Data.

“The handbook provides exceptional strategies, recommendations, and guidelines for researchers who seek to conduct interviews with the powerful. … This handbook is appropriate for a large audience including graduate students and all researchers/professors who seek to conduct quality qualitative analysis with powerful actors in a variety of disciplines. Overall, this book is exceptional, and I highly recommend it to those in the criminal justice field.” (Megan J. Parker, Crime Law and Social Change, June 23, 2020)“The book is particularly useful for those preparing for fieldwork who are not planning to study the kind of people the penal system is designed to detect, judge and lock up – the kind of people criminology is designed to study.” (Ignacio González-Sánchez, European Journal of Probation, May 13, 2020)