TY - JOUR

T1 - Shadow writing and participant observation

T2 - a study of criminal justice social work around sentencing

AU - Halliday, Simon

AU - Burns, Nicola

AU - Hutton, Neil

AU - McNeill, Fergus

AU - Tata, Cyrus

PY - 2008/6

Y1 - 2008/6

N2 - 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

AB - 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

U2 - 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2008.00435.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2008.00435.x

M3 - Journal article

VL - 35

SP - 189

EP - 213

JO - Journal of Law and Society

JF - Journal of Law and Society

SN - 0263-323X

IS - 2

ER -