Nexus-Based Research: A Methodological Framework for Engaging Criminalized and Psychiatrized Individuals in Qualitative Research

Overview: Criminal-legal diversion programs present unique methodological, practical, and ethical considerations for qualitative social work researchers interviewing participants. Drawing from existing scholarship and our study of a mental health-focused court diversion program, we'll introduce and discuss a human rights-oriented framework for researching at the nexus of criminal-legal and mental healthcare systems.Proposal text: As social work has taken up the Grand Challenge of Promoting Smart Decarceration, the profession’s attention has turned toward building an evidence base for non-carceral interventions. Criminal-legal diversion programs and alternatives to incarceration have expanded in recent years, and as a result, more social workers are acting as practitioners and researchers in these contexts. In these settings, social workers are tasked with engaging clients who are often dually involved in community mental health and criminal-legal systems. Existing scholarship attends to the challenges of engaging individuals with serious mental illness as research subjects. Social work scholars have also emphasized the human rights promises of pursuing research within jails, prisons, and courts. However, existing methodological frameworks have not addressed the specific challenges of conducting qualitative social work research at the nexus of criminal-legal and psychiatric oppression. Prior scholarship clearly documents the risk of epistemic injustice when criminalized and psychiatrized individuals are invited to become research subjects.

An anti-oppressive research methods framework tailored to this programmatic context should approach data collection through a trauma-informed human rights and social justice lens. Court diversion participants require a unique and flexible set of social work interventions to support their meaningful engagement and completion of program mandates. It logically follows that when diversion programming clients are asked to participate in qualitative research, researchers must attend to ethical and pragmatic considerations to prevent material, ethical, or epistemic injustices as byproducts of the research process. Social work education and research should build an evidence base of non-carceral social work interventions by integrating a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive research framework that attends to the strengths and vulnerabilities of psychiatrized and criminalized research participants.

Our team of social work researchers who all possess social work practice experience are engaged in an ongoing study of mental health-focused court diversion programming in a large Midwest city. Especially given participants’ ongoing criminal-legal involvement and psychiatric symptoms, engaging participants ethically and effectively is of utmost importance.

After developing interview questions, obtaining informed consent, conducting interviews with participants, compensating participants, and qualitatively interpreting interview data, we identified a set of methodological findings. First, the role of boundaried rapport-building with research participants is essential. Second, the intersection of criminalization and pathologization can result in heightened guardedness or distrust from research participants, who might be hesitant to share experiences with researchers. Third, the researcher may benefit from a practice-informed approach to research that mobilizes an understanding of psychiatric symptoms and common legal terms in order to avoid epistemic gaps in the research process. These findings stem from participant interview data as well as researcher-authored memos that were created during data collection.

This interactive workshop introduces participants to our nexus-based qualitative methodological framework, a human-rights and trauma-informed approach that is oriented toward social and epistemic justice in research. Presenters will first introduce our findings, explain our framework, then facilitate discussion with attendees about applications of the framework to their own work. Inviting attendees to consider their own research and practice experiences, the workshop will illustrate key considerations of our novel framework.