Journal of Legal Research Methodology

Positionality, Gender and Reflexivity in Outsider-Insider Research

Anqi Shen — 2024-02-09

This article examines the intricacies of researcher positionality in a study examining women in policing in China. It aims to shed light on the manifold ways in which researcher positionality – the researcher’s relationship with the participants, gender and other identities – impacts the research process. The study draws from my own experiences, as a female researcher and former insider, engaging in qualitative interviews with both female and male police officers in the context of a feminist inquiry into women in Chinese policing. This article explores the advantages and challenges of outsider-insider research, dissects the role of gender in shaping the research landscape and probes how the researcher’s myriad identities may influence research access, information gathering, data analysis, findings and conclusions. Moreover, it discusses strategies adopted to overcome research barriers. By presenting this outsider-insider research as a case study, the article underscores the vital role of researcher reflexivity in unearthing the truth regarding women’s experiences and upholding academic rigour. It not only advocates for the use of qualitative interviewing as a tool for knowledge production, but also makes important contributes to the fields of feminist research and qualitative inquiry. In addition, it offers compelling narratives of women within Chinese law enforcement, thereby enriching the discourse on gender policing studies.

An Insider Within

Anne Kotonya — 2024-02-09

This article utilizes doctoral research on access to justice and clinical legal education to reflect on the positionality that the researcher embodies from their diverse professional affiliations. It adds a nuance to the debate on positionality by relaying it as a concentric experience. The article offers insights on navigating layered insider status through the use of reflexivity journals, removing familiarity in the interview environment and returning to the literature after fieldwork. Noting that one may still be perceived as ‘other,’ it outlines the role of go-betweens to access research participants, follow-up questions to allow for participant voices to be heard and a friendly demeanour to build rapport. The article supports training of novice researchers in reflexivity and grounded theory research as ways of facilitating rigour. It will be useful for socio-legal researchers who have a propensity to embody layered insider status from their diverse professional affiliations when researching in their own countries.

Can ethnic disparities in sentencing be taken as evidence of judicial discrimination?

Jose Pina Sanchez — 2024-02-09

Large research efforts have been directed at the exploration of ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, documenting harsher treatment of minority ethnic defendants, across offence types, criminal justice decisions, and jurisdictions. However, most studies on the topic have relied on observational data, which can only approximate ‘like with like’ comparisons. We use causal diagrams to lay out explicitly the different ways estimates of ethnic disparities in sentencing derived from observational data could be biased. Beyond the commonly acknowledged problem of unobserved case characteristics, we also discuss other less well-known, yet likely more consequential problems: measurement error in the form of racially-determined case characteristics or as a result of disparities within the ‘Whites’ reference group, and selection bias from non-response and missing offenders’ ethnicity data. We apply such causal framework to review findings from two recent studies showing ethnic disparities in custodial sentences imposed at the Crown Court (England and Wales). We also use simulations to recreate the most comprehensive of those studies, and demonstrate how the reported ethnic disparities appear robust to a problem of unobserved case characteristics. We conclude that ethnic disparities observed in the Crown Court are likely reflecting evidence of direct discrimination in sentencing.