Qualitative Criminology (QC)
Abstract
"As technology has altered communication, qualitative criminologists have turned to digital spaces for a cost-effective approach to recruit participants who have been impacted by the criminal legal system. This paper analyzes the limits and benefits of online recruitment, detailing our experience recruiting 93 interviewees online for a qualitative study of criminal record expungement. We compare three approaches: social media advertisements, Amazon’s crowdsourced MTurk platform, and the opt-in survey platform Prolific, and analyze the financial and labor costs associated with each. We detail our experience individually screening 685 interested participants to obtain 86 qualitative interviews suitable for analysis. Our experience shows that casting a wide net using more cost-efficient digital advertising often requires intensive manual review and researcher labor, while more costly recruitment platforms, such as Prolific, reduce labor costs but introduce new questions of sample bias. While digital recruitment is a helpful tool for obtaining a broad and diverse set of participants, working online also raises methodological and ethical questions regarding the researcher’s role in verifying the veracity of interviewees' experiences."
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Lageson, Sarah; Caliman, Carolina R.; Chen, Elsa; and Adams, Ericka
(2026)
"Online recruitment for interview participants impacted by the criminal legal system,"
Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 15:
No.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol15/iss1/5
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Legal Theory Commons, Other Law Commons, Other Legal Studies Commons