Approach to the Field — Data

This book was originally inspired by the work of Tony Parker — in particular, Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers. In that work, Parker somehow managed to step ‘outside’ the prose so that the stories could be told. He asked nothing of the reader — there was no explicit political, social or theoretical agenda being pushed. But the book had a curious way of imploring audiences to ask questions about the causes of crime, of deep personal trauma and about what might be done to prevent such. Equally, in a field often wedded to large cohort studies, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was central to the current research. That work provided irrefutable evidence that delving into the trials and tribulations of a very small group of people could matter — that it could produce something worthwhile for readers (perhaps even for policy-makers and practitioners). It was and remains a master class in how to research the life of ‘one’ person and connect it so deftly to the lives of those who orbit around them.