Identity Thieves: Motives and Methods

Methodological Appendix

141 MethodoLoGICaL appendIX Criminologists have a long history of interviewing those engaged in illegal behaviors to gain insights into the nature of crime and criminality. ethnographic interviews allow offenders to explain their offenses and lifestyles from their own perspectives. This is important because those engaged in criminal activities are in the “unique position of being able to describe, in their own words, the motivations and causes of crime, the level and nature of crime calculus , and the perceived effectiveness of crime control activities in deterring crime.”1 When the voices of those engaged in illegal activity are coupled with the researchers’ analyses, students and criminal justice professionals have a more realistic picture of the world of offenders.2 The researcher’s job is to notice patterns in what offenders have to say, then organize those patterns. This is not an easy task, and subjective decisions must be made throughout the process. such subjectivity is the foundation for much of the criticism of ethnographic research. Thus, we think it is important to be transparent with our methodology, so that others can make their own decisions about the validity and reliability of our research and the conclusions we draw from it. our discussion of the research design focuses on both the advantages and challenges of conducting research in federal prisons, and on the strategies we employed to gain compliance from participants and elicit honest and meaningful answers to our questions. Few would deny that posing open-ended questions to offenders is important for a full understanding of crime and criminality. one difficult part of seeking the offender perspective is locating suitable participants. While there are many places ethnographers 142 methodological appendix can recruit offenders (street corners, bars, shelters, rehabilitation meetings, jails, or prisons, for example), we sought out offenders who were serving time in federal correctional facilities. We made this decision for several reasons. a major factor in our decision centered on the complexity of defining identity theft. By narrowing our sample to those convicted at the federal level, we were able to achieve some degree of standardization as to the types of offenders we interviewed (though the sample still exhibited considerable diversity ). specifically, we chose to exclude cases of credit card fraud in which offenders stole only existing account numbers and not the personally identifying information of their victims. additionally, the nature of identity theft differs greatly from other street crimes. Many who engage in the activity are not part of a criminal subculture (though some are). Thus, using traditional means of locating hard-to-reach populations, such as snowball or respondent-driven sampling, is quite difficult for this group. For such samples to be representative, it is necessary to tap into as many social networks as possible. While this approach might have produced a sample of street-level identity thieves, it likely would have failed to recruit the various types of offenders that represent the inherent diversity in this crime: members of occupational teams, street level identity thieves, and loners. When seeking the perspectives of inmates, researchers face challenges that those interviewing active offenders do not, including skepticism from others about the validity of their findings.3 Those who criticize the use of incarcerated-offender samples sometimes repeat the analogy of the animal in the zoo, to make the point that one cannot learn as much about crime and criminality from the incarcerated as one can from speaking to those in “the wild.”4 according to one proponent of active-offender samples, “We can no longer afford the convenient fiction that in studying criminals in their natural habitat, we would discover nothing really important that could not be discovered from criminals behind bars. What is true for studying the gorilla of zoology is likely to be even truer for studying the gorilla of criminology.”5 While this colorful metaphor has been often repeated, it may be specious. non-human methodological appendix 143 animals do not have the ability to articulate their thoughts, decision processes, or motives, in the present or the past. Biologists must observe animals in the wild because beasts cannot verbally describe how and why they select certain prey, or otherwise interpret their actions to us.6 Fortunately for social scientists, “our subjects, unlike chemicals or cells or apes, are perfectly capable of communicating to researchers, explaining what they have been through, what they do, and what they hope to achieve with various behaviours.”7 Because...