Badania biograficzne rodzin więźniów. Refleksja metodologiczna
Biographical studies of prisoners’ families. Methodological notes

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the life situation of the families of prisoners, in particular, parentalrelationships connected with the experience of incarceration in a correctional institution.During the realisation of the research I noticed many difficulties in finding contact withpotential interlocutors, therefore I considered the families of prisoners as an environment“invisible in the research field”. In addition, I defined families of prisoners as marginalisedand stigmatised environments. The main aim of the article is to show selectedmethodological dilemmas that can be encountered through the design and analysis ofbiographical research of family members of prisoners. The theoretical introduction of thepaper as an extended definition of the penitentiary crisis allowed to characterise thedominant trends and directions of research on prisoners’ families. Further, it focused onselected problems of realisation of qualitative research (especially biographical research).I analyse the literature and present my own methodological approach based on the directionof interpretative sociology. Using the potential of the autobiographical narrative interviewtechnique (of the German sociological school of Fritz Schütze), I collected 31 interviewswith adult children of prisoners and 30 interviews with parents of prisoners. Finally, I referto my own research experience and discuss the “usefulness and ineffectiveness” of anautobiographical narrative interview. Moreover, I characterise key reflections on the roleof the researcher in obtaining autobiographical narrations. The article is an invitation to discuss the improvement of research procedures, especially in the area of research on familymembers of persons in prisons.

• Details
• Contents