Person-centred social science, ethnography-led measurement, and intellectual craftsmanship

Abstract Chapter 2 describes the way the research drawn on in the book was carried out and explains why it developed in the way that it did. The author articulates her style, values, research philosophy, and learned vision of meaningful research practice, which she describes as a version of Goethe’s ‘delicate empiricism’. This is tender, immersed, person-centred, and exacting. She describes the specific methodology she calls ethnography-led measurement and ends with a ‘methodological manifesto’: a post-hoc declaration of her thinking about research after a professional lifetime spent doing it. She argues in this chapter that just as being in prison can force on prisoners a brutal realisation of ‘what matters’, for researchers too there are special conditions that make prisons uniquely challenging and yet, if we can bear it, paradoxically well suited to moral inquiry. Their closed, controlled, contained, and punishing nature, apparently ‘improving’ function yet obvious painfulness, makes every moment we spend in them vivid, instructive, and significant. To be a responsible witness takes energy and care. She explains why dwelling in a subject makes more sense than thinking about it from a distance. But this dynamic and complex process can take us to—or over—our limits. Time and patience are needed to inquire and discern, without adding harm, in this troubling and tragic institution.