Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing
| Author | Neil Hutton,Simon Halliday,Nicola Burns,Cyrus Tata,Fergus McNeill |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2008.00435.x |
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 35, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2008
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 189±213
Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of
Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing
Simon Halliday,* Nicola Burns,** Neil Hutton,***
Fergus McNeill,**** and Cyrus Tata***
The study of decision-making by public officials in administrative
settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for
decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda
are well understood: how can socio-legal researchers get inside the
heads of legal decision-makers in order to understand the uses of
official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique
the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision-making
practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre-sentence
reports for the courts. This technique, called `shadow writing',
involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the
researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the
social workers. By comparing these `shadow reports' with the real
reports in a training-like setting, the social workers revealed in detail
the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular
reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.
189
ß2008 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2008 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Law School, University of Strathclyde and School of Law, University of
New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia
simon.halliday@strath.ac.uk
** Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research, Department of Sociology,
Anthropology and Applied Social Science, University of Glasgow, Adam
Smith Building, Glasgow G12 8RT, Scotland
n.burns@lbss.gla.ac.uk
*** Law School, University of Strathclyde, St James' Road, Glasgow G4
0LT, Scotland
n.hutton@strath.ac.uk cyrus.tata@strath.ac.uk
**** Glasgow School of Social Work, Sir Henry Wood Building, University
of Strathclyde, 76 Southbrae Drive, Glasgow G13 1PP, Scotland
fergus.mcneill@strath.ac.uk
This article marks the first in a commissioned, occasional series on empirical innovations
and justice research methods. They will draw to the attention of the socio-legal com-
munity issues associated with empirical work particularly those that involve innovation in
research methods or can otherwise stimulate the development of empirical work.
In a fascinating study of administrative behaviour, Robert Kagan captures
the key challenge faced by socio-legal researchers who seek to penetrate the
social world of public officials and get at the real substance of their decision-
making processes:
1
The process of legal decision in an administrative agency is not easily
susceptible to pure observation. It takes place at desks, in offices, in occasional
conferences and telephone conversations, and in hurried conversations in
corridors. The participants spend a great deal of time studying documents. To
a very great extent, the process takes place inside people's heads.
How does the researcher get inside the heads of such legal decision-makers?
Kagan's solution was to conduct overt participant observation by working as a
lawyer in his chosen agency, making the very decisions he wanted to
understand as a researcher. There is a meaningful sense, of course, in which
simply being present in a fieldsite as an observer is also a form of par-
ticipation.
2
One does not actually have to be a fully-integrated worker like
Kagan to be a participant in the field. By asking questions, or responding to the
curiosity of the research subjects about why the researcher is there, s/he
inevitably becomes part of the activities of those research subjects. Even by
his/her silent presence, the researcher will usually affect the dynamics inside a
research site, particularly in the early stages of fieldwork, and so cannot avoid
`participating' in this sense.
3
So observation and participation are better
conceived, not as separate activities, but as inevitably overlapping roles within
the field. This is not to say that we cannot make meaningful distinctions
between differing forms of participation in the field. Such distinctions are,
perhaps, especially easy in the context of researching legal decision-making in
a public agency. The bureaucratic organization and division of labour within
such agencies, with their hierarchies and lines of responsibility, lends itself
particularly well to this.
4
At one end of the observer-participant spectrum, the
researcher, like Kagan, might issue decisions for the agency and use that
experience to reflect on that discretionary process.
5
At the other end of the
190
1 R. Kagan, Regulatory Justice: Implementing a Wage-Price Freeze (1978) 185.
2T.May, Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process (1998) 139.
3 See R. Burgess In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research (1990) pp. 79±80.
4 Our analysis here needs to be distinguished from the classic typology of roles in
relation to field observations (R. Gold, `Roles in Sociological Field Observations'
(1958) 36 Social Forces 217±23). At the extremes of Gold's scheme are the roles of
`complete participant' and `complete observer'. Both of these involve covert research.
Between these extremes are `participant-as-observer' and `observer-as-participant'.
Given that the role of observer-as-participant `is used in studies involving one-visit
interviews' (p. 221), May is probably right to suggest that we should not, strictly
speaking, regard this as participant observation (May, op. cit., n. 2, p. 140.) Most self-
proclaiming participant observational researchers would be described by Gold as
having adopted the role of the participant-as-observer. Our analysis makes
distinctions within this category.
5 See, for example, S. Halliday, `Judicial Review and Administrative Justice',
unpublished PhD thesis, Strathclyde University (1999).
ß2008 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2008 Cardiff University Law School
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