Feminist Approaches to Interviewing: Women's Experiences of Electronic Monitoring

Abstract

My PhD research looks at the experiences of women who have received an electronically monitored curfew as a community sentence. Electronic monitoring (known colloquially as tagging) is a particularly interesting sentence to research because although it is familiar to policy makers, the media and the public, very little is actually known about how it functions and how it is experienced by those subject to such monitoring. Research which does exist focuses predominantly on men. Given my choice of topic, it was inevitable that feminist theory would play a part in shaping the project overall. I chose my research topic fully expecting that feminist research and theory would feature heavily in the literature review, the theoretical basis and the methods and methodology. However, I realised there was an impasse between researching offenders and researching women, with relatively few discussions of researching female offenders included within methodological literature. The problem was that neither accounts of researching women nor offenders seemed to offer an accurate portrayal of the situations I was expecting to encounter when conducting fieldwork. Therefore, this case study highlights challenges the researcher might face when working with female offenders and offers some indication of how best to respond to them.

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