The Achilles Heel of studies on crime, violence and criminal dynamics

Abstract

This study has two objectives: to map the production indexed by the keywords “crime,” “criminal,” “criminality” and “violence” in the most important journals of sociology (those indexed as A1 and A2 in the Capes Foundation Qualis) and to understand which are the research methods mobilized in these analyses. In general, studies on crime, violence and criminal dynamics have experienced an increasing incorporation of qualitative research techniques, with emphasis on the use of ethnographies, semi-structured interviews and participant observation of contexts of urban violence, such as favelas in large cities and overcrowded prisons. The scrutiny of official data or databases constructed from surveys is far from being the main empirical substrate for the understanding of crime dynamics, being ahead of the studies that combine quantitative and qualitative techniques of social research. The balance of the literature indicates that the area’s Achilles heel lies in the difficulty of incorporating methodologies that go beyond the description of the place, in order to move towards a more comprehensive production of the national context.