One of the most highly acclaimed sociological studies of recent years is Alice Goffman’s On the Run (2014). Knowledge of Goffman’s study would be useful when writing about crime, policing, ethnicity and racism, and as an example of the use of participant observation.
The study was a participant observation study of a poor, predominantly black neighbourhood of Philadelphia. It was carried out in the context of unprecedented rates of imprisonment for young black men in the USA, with about 11% imprisoned at any one time compared to about 2% of young white men.
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