Continuing on my theme of “qualitative is empirical too” I want to highlight an important study about law and ordinary citizens – in this case when they are called on to be jurors in capital cases.
Ben Fleury-Steiner’s, Jurors’ Stories of Death comes out of the famous Capital Jury Project led by William Bowers. We have known since the famous Baldus study that there is racial bias in the imposition in the death penalty in the United States.
The CJP is an ambitious qualitative and quantitative study which analyzes jurors decision making at every phase of the capital sentencing project. In 14 states, the CJP chose 20 – 30 capital trials, selected 4 jurors from each jury and conducted extensive interviews with these 1,201 capital jurors from 354 trials. The quantitative findings are really interesting -- one example I particularly like demonstrates jurors’ systematic misunderstanding of what will happen to the defendants if they are not executed. But how do we explain the racial bias?
Ben Fleury-Steiner does it excellently with qualitative research. Based on the larger and systematically drawn sample, Fleury-Steiner’s qualitative interviews are drawn from a rigorously-drawn sample (one of the ways to evaluate qualitative research is on the quality of the sample – his is excellent because it is across state, the trials were randomly selected within the period, and he talked to multiple people of different races from the SAME juries to hear what happened in the jury room). The shocking thing is how honestly jurors spoke of the role of race in determining death sentences. Consider just 2 representative quotes from one of Fleury-Steiner's article:
“I saw the defendant as a very typical product of the lower, socioeconomic, black group who grew up with no values, no ideals, no authority, no morals, no leadership . . . and that was one of the problems we had . . . he wasn’t a white kid.” (page 557, white juror, black defendant sentenced to death).
After telling Fleury-Steiner that anyone who was born in the South but does not consider themselves racist is a liar, a 62 year old white Southerner who had just sentenced an African-American man to death said, “you know if they’d been white people, I would’ve had a different attitude” (page 566).
Seeing a table that summarizes juror misunderstandings it interesting; reading the actual words of jurors who participated in death decisions (which we know are racially skewed) saying these blatantly racist statements is powerful in a way that cannot be overstated. It speaks to people who are not convinced by or do not understand the statistics, but more than that, it demonstrates the mechanisms through which race becomes salient in the jury room which tells us something in addition to the very important facts we know about outcomes.
The methodological lessons for qualitative research are about drawing the sample and the strength of a smaller sample drawn from and embedded in a larger, well-drawn sample. The analysis of the qualitative data is done well according to principles you can read about in these great books:
Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (Strauss)
Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis (Lofland and Lofland)
Laura Beth, you make some really good points here and in the last post about the way that qualitative research forms a vital part of the overall empirical research picture. Often, it seems that getting down on the ground to see how patterns work can help us to understand the mechanisms that generate the patterns we see through larger-scale quantitative research. Of course, as you pointed out in your Monday post, qualitative empirical research also makes contributions in its own right to our understanding of law. While some kinds of qualitative research rely on samples of the kind Albiston and Fleury-Steiner use, others like Heimer and Staffen utilize ethnographic methods that are not reliant on samples. As you pointed out, well-done ethnographic fieldwork is a very taxing and demanding form of empirical research. There are standards here as well, so that just visiting an institutional setting briefly and talking with a skewed subset of the people there would not cut it. When I sit on doctoral committees for anthropology and sociology graduate students, it is standard to require lengthy fieldwork, systematic fieldnotes, careful consideration of the full social or institutional structure involved, and taking a number of methodological precautions to preclude presuppositions or bias from limiting the scope of students' participant observation. (In anthropology, it is common to expect a year or more of fieldwork and also to require linguistic proficiency in one's field language.) Anthropologists also use methods such as door-to-door census work in our communities, systematic linguistic proficiency assessments, and taping of interviews -- as well as of public events and other interactions.
So, of course, from this perspective, it's easy to see why those of us who do this work wouldn't agree that it's a feature of almost all legal research! I look forward to hearing more on this and other topics as the week progresses. Thanks for the interesting posts!
Posted by: Elizabeth Mertz | 25 October 2006 at 10:34 PM