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Focus-Group Methodology in Research with Incarcerated Women: Race, Power, and Collective Experience

Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada, spollack{at}wlu.ca

Feminist researchers have found focus groups to be valuable for understanding collective experiences of marginalization, developing a structural analysis of individual experiences, and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. These benefits are in contrast to individual interviews, which may lend themselves to privatized and individualistic accounts of gendered experiences and which risk reproducing colonizing relationships and discourses. This study used both individual interviews (life-history methodology) and focus-group interviews to examine the effects of marginalization and oppression on Black Canadian women's lawbreaking. Combining these two methodologies may be particularly fruitful in cross-cultural and/or cross-racial research and in contexts such as correctional institutions, where issues of power and disclosure are amplified.

Key Words: female offenders • focus-group methodology • Black women prisoners

Affilia, Vol. 18, No. 4, 461-472 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0886109903257550


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