Inequality, Class, and Economics

Abstract

the role of sampling and other methodological concepts in qualitative research, and organizing and coding data. Its section on training researchers features unexpectedly moving passages about the emotional toll this research had on researchers, including Rudes herself, while reviewing how these impacts were managed. Despite the book’s many strengths, one disadvantage of its style is that the reader never gets to know the interviewees’ individual stories in depth beyond relatively brief one-off quotes. Rudes explains that she deliberately avoided presenting more than one quote with the same pseudonym, since repeated quotes could enable the identification of individuals and pose security risks. Observation of the RHUs was also impossible due to institutional concerns. These restrictions, though understandable, diminish the data’s ethnographic richness. As someone most familiar with the grounded theory and extended case method approaches to qualitative research, I was initially surprised at the book’s lack of detailed engagement with theory. Aside from the concept of masked malignancy, which reappears periodically in the book as a way of capturing the various hidden harms generated by RHUs, theorization is largely absent. Yet this is not necessarily a shortcoming, since there are many legitimate ways to envision the role of theory in qualitative research. The book’s restrained approach to theory, aside from being friendly to the lay reader, seems consistent with the view of some sociologists, like Max Besbris and Shamus Khan (2017), who argue for empirical description and novel empirical findings for their own sake, with minimal theoretical explanations. The book does, it is worth noting, do a fine job of placing its findings in the context of previous research and findings from other fields. Surviving Solitary illustrates well the potential magic of qualitative research: how simply letting people speak for themselves, with some sparse yet insightful commentary, can function as a devastating critique. Thebook would be a fitting addition to a corrections class or a monograph-based introductory course. But most of all, I want copies in the hands of policy-makers.