Community-engaged prison-based research in a pandemic: the efficacy of summative content analysis for understanding prison culture and climate

ABSTRACT

The challenges presented by COVID-19 in prison settings highlight the need for research that captures the lived experiences and needs of incarcerated individuals. Primary data collection among people living in prison during the global pandemic, however, presents unfamiliar obstacles that require innovation and invite opportunities to adopt methods not traditional in criminal-legal research. This manuscript details the application of summative content analysis to consider incarcerated persons’ perceptions of institutional culture and climate. This research was conducted as part of the Prison Research and Innovation Initiative (PRII). A written open-ended questionnaire yielded data from 84 individuals incarcerated in a medium-security institution in the Midwest region of the United States. The results highlight several prominent themes in prison culture and climate and endorse the use of open-ended questionnaires analyzed with summative content analysis as a viable approach to collecting and examining high-quality data from people living in prison. The results from this work also underscore the efficacy of this method as a part of community-engaged research in prison settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison climate and culture
• summative content analysis
• community-engaged research

Acknowledgments

This work was completed under the Urban Institute’s Prison Research and Innovation Initiative, supported by Arnold Ventures—a five-year effort to leverage research and evidence to shine a much-needed light on prison conditions and pilot strategies to promote the well-being of people who are confined and work behind bars.

The views expressed here are those of the author/authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, Arnold Ventures, its trustees, or its funders.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. More information on the PRII Project can be found here: https://www.urban.org/features/prison-research-and-innovation-initiative

2. As part of the grant project, an innovation manager was hired to work with the Department of Corrections to help manage grant activities and work in partnership with the research team. This individual had a history of working within the Department of Corrections but was new to the study facility.

3. This volunteer list served as the participant base for several other components of the participatory process not discussed in this article, including in-depth interviews via phone and Zoom as well as our member checking process (see Birt et al., 2016 for more information on member-checking).

4. One person was removed from the volunteer list because he was discharged from the facility.

5. One individual identified as ‘human’ and was coded as missing.

6. The rate of agreement by broad categories ranged from 100% to a low of 70% in one category with an average agreement rate across categories at 92.5%. The researchers met to discuss any discrepancies so that full consensus on measurement could be reached.

7. Demographic data were summarized using descriptive statistics. Participant responses to closed-ended questionnaire items were also summarized by calculating frequencies. Three participants omitted their age. One participant had missing race and ethnicity data. No other demographic and prison data point was missing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Urban Institute.