Multi‐Method Synergy: Using the Life History Calendar and Life as a Film for Retrospective Narratives
| Author | TIMOTHY KANG,CANDACE KRUTTSCHNITT,PHILIP GOODMAN |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12231 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
The Howard Journal Vol56 No 4. December 2017 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12231
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 532–553
Multi-Method Synergy: Using
the Life History Calendar and Life
as a Film for Retrospective Narratives
TIMOTHY KANG, CANDACE KRUTTSCHNITT
and PHILIP GOODMAN
Timothy Kang is PhD candidate, Candace Kruttschnitt is Professor, and Philip
Goodman is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Abstract: As scholars of crime increasingly use narratives elicited from people found
guilty of committing crime, it is critical that we reflect methodologically and theoretically
on exactly how researchers collect those narratives, and what scholars do with people’s
stories and conceptualisations of their past, present, and future. To contribute to these
reflections, we examine the utility of the Life History Calendar (LHC) and the Life as a
Film (LAAF) procedurefor collecting retrospective life histories from incarcerated chronic
offenders. We note the respective advantages of each method, particularly for capturing
the dynamic social contexts and reflected appraisals during critical periods of the life
course of offenders. Most importantly, we argue that using the LHC and the LAAF
together not only supplements the deficiencies of each method, but they also work together
synergistically to improve the breadth and depth of data collection and our ability to
understand the interplay between narratives, context, and experience.
Keywords: Life as a Film (LAAF); life course; Life History Calendar (LHC);
offender narratives
The need to understand life-course patterns in criminal activity has
resulted in many different techniques for gathering longitudinal data. The
Life History Calendar (LHC) method has long been used in life-course
research and is featured in a variety of criminological studies (for a re-
view of applications in criminology,see Roberts and Horney (2010); Sutton
(2010)). Although research using data collected with LHCs has contributed
greatly to our understanding of the life course of offenders, it provides an
incomplete picture of offenders’ interpretations or understandings of the
transitions and events it records (Harris and Parisi 2007). The Life as a
Film (LAAF) method developed by Canter and Youngs (2015) is another
way by which to collect retrospective life histories through personal narra-
tives, and is particularly useful in garnering nuanced data shedding light
532
C
2017 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol56 No 4. December 2017
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 532–553
upon how offenders understand their own lives. Further, because narra-
tives are at the heart of our self-conceptions and identity, they have the
potential to influence future behaviour and intentions of criminal desis-
tance and, therefore, deserve scholarly attention (Maruna 2001; McAdams
2001; Mische 2009; Paterniti 2000; Presser 2009; Presser and Sandberg
2015). In this article, we discuss our experience using both the LHC and
the LAAF methods in our study of persistent offenders, and the advan-
tages of each method for collecting data on the patterns, social contexts,
and respondents’ personal understandings of their offending. We argue
that using the LHC and the LAAF together not only supplements the de-
ficiencies of each method, but also that they work together synergistically
to improve the breadth and depth of retrospective data collection, as well
as our ability to understand the interaction of social contexts and reflected
appraisals.
The motivation for using these two data collection techniques came from
our interest in understanding the persistence process. With a few notable
exceptions (see, for example, Giordano, Schroeder and Cernkovich 2007;
Jacobs and Copes 2015; Shover 1996; Steffensmeier and Ulmer 2005), the
study of persistent criminal offenders remains relatively underdeveloped
in criminology. Traditionally, persistence has been understood by study-
ing and mapping patterns of offending (for example, Piquero, Farrington
and Blumstein 2003), using actuarial approaches to identify and inter-
vene in the lives of high-risk offenders (for example, Andrews, Bonta and
Hoge 1990), or by assuming that persistence occurs when the factors that
promote desistance are absent (for example, Sampson and Laub 1993).
While these approaches have contributed greatly to our understanding of
the aetiology of crime and the aggregate impact of background factors on
offending rates over the life course, they shed less light on how people
understand their lives, and how those understandings, in turn, condition
subsequent offending. We, therefore, sought to understand the process of
persistence by examining the social contexts surrounding patterns of crim-
inal offending that have been linked to either intensifying or dampening
down offending. Less well studied, but we believe equally important, is an
offender’s self-evaluations and reflected appraisals which derive from, and
are embedded in, their social contexts.
To accomplish these research goals, we conducted interviews with
chronic offenders currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prisons us-
ing two different methods of data collection during our interviews to ensure
that all relevant information was collected. First, a LHC (Freedman et al.
1988) was constructed to focus on the timing and sequencing of events
and transitions that would provide information on the social contexts sur-
rounding criminal offending. Second, the LAAF procedure (Canter and
Youngs 2015) was used after the completion of the LHC to elicit narra-
tives of how respondents saw themselves (self-evaluations), and how they
believe others saw them (reflected self-appraisals) at various stages, and in
various domains, of their lives. This allowed for the respondents to write
their own life story by moving away from the structured LHC procedure
that may mimic the repetitive and rehearsed accounts provided to various
533
C
2017 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
To continue reading
Request your trial