When Sam Houston State University Professor Danielle S. Rudes evaluated the major criminology programs in the United States a decade ago, she discovered that many of them required robust training in quantitative methods, but very few offered required training in qualitative methods. Although some programs offered qualitative training on an elective basis, the takeaway was clear: quantitative methods are considered critical to criminological research. Qualitative methods? Not so much.
This bias is not entirely without cause. On the surface, qualitative research doesn’t appear to be a particularly helpful tool for creating change in carceral facilities. Politicians, policy makers, and government workers are primarily focused on making decisions based on quantitative data: what are the demographics of carceral residents in a certain jurisdiction? How many people are entering facilities within a certain timeframe? Such data, in addition to helping leaders make budgetary, staffing, and related decisions, gives politicians a clean soundbite for communicating with stakeholders while psychologically shielding them from the messier human impacts of their decisions.
But with the right audience, qualitative research can be invaluable. Professor Rudes and her team recently had the opportunity to investigate increased violence at a carceral facility, at the request of leadership.
“We came up with some interesting stuff,” she explains. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, we would have blamed it on X, Y, and Z—and you’re telling me it’s a little bit of X, not Y at all, Z is ridiculous, and then it’s A, B, and C’…I didn’t develop policy for them, but I did develop the data that they need to rethink some of their policies and procedures.”
“I can’t claim that I did anything other than give them information, but if they make policies that make that prison safer for anyone, the staff or the residents, based on the data that I was able to provide them, I consider that a qualitative win.”
Professor Rudes fell in love with qualitative work at her UC Irvine graduate program, where a yearlong qualitative methods seminar taught by Professors Calvin Morrill and David Snow clarified her ambition to specialize in the experiential side of sociological research. Her interest in the criminal legal system, however, began at a much earlier age. Growing up, Professor Rudes watched as her hometown, once an agricultural and manufacturing community, slowly evolved into a prison town. Tougher sentencing laws in the 1980s and 1990s had increased New York City’s incarcerated population dramatically, and the cheap, available land near her childhood home in upstate New York provided the perfect space for carceral expansion. The new prisons transformed the area’s economy, swiftly taking over as the top employers. These days, most of Professor Rudes’s high school classmates work in the prison industry, or at least know somebody who does.
These childhood experiences humanized her perception of carceral employees, but her early professional experiences helped her understand the people on the other side of prison bars. After obtaining her first master’s degree, Professor Rudes worked at Goodwill’s San Francisco headquarters, preparing people with various disadvantages to enter the workforce for the first time. On the surface, this primarily consisted of teaching skills necessary to land and retain jobs in the hospitality and retail industries. For students coming out of prisons and jails, however, she found that much of the needed preparation was emotional, not practical, in nature.
“My favorite students were the ones that were coming out of prisons and jails,” she reminisces. “They were so traumatized and so harmed, they couldn’t even look me in the eye. And I did a lot of work with them to get them workforce ready, to make them feel human, and to make them feel like they were okay.”
For those fortunate enough to have never been inside, prisons can be a bit of a black box. This is, of course, by design—prisons constitute an alternate world, designed to restrain those deemed unfit for mainstream society. American carceral facilities, and the people they house, are relegated to the periphery of social consciousness, mere apparitions stoking fear in those that remain outside. Their stories are largely ignored or forgotten.
Professor Rudes has dedicated her decades-long career to preventing those stories from remaining unheard. After teaching criminology at George Mason University (GMU) for 14 years, she joined Sam Houston State University in 2022, where she teaches criminal justice and criminology. As Deputy Director of the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!) at GMU since 2009, she works with ACE! Director and GMU Professor Faye S. Taxman to oversee the development and implementation of research methodologies designed to address challenges facing the correctional system—all while keeping the qualitative tradition alive by involving students and early career researchers in the work as much as possible.
“I run qualitative methods seminars for my research team, and I’ve trained my graduate students to do that too.” Bragging on behalf of her current research lead Bryce Kushmerick-McCune, Professor Rudes continues, “She’s a doctoral student, and she hosted an entire multi-day training for faculty who were on the tenure track already.”
Wielding her undergraduate degree in communications, she also hosts a podcast, “Aced It,” in which she translates recent research papers on topics related to incarceration and opioid use disorder for a lay audience. The 100+ episode show is part of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) project.
“I use my mom as my guinea pig pretty often,” she shares. “If she can’t understand it, it’s not good enough for the podcast.
“The idea is to make research accessible for anyone who can’ t access those articles—and even if they could, can’t read them…We don’t write for laypeople, and the laypeople are who need to see this research the most, right? They’re the ones that are going to make real policy and practice decisions.”
After roughly ten years focused on challenges related to the re-entry process, and another 12+ dedicated to studying carceral institutions, Professor Rudes published Surviving Solitary. The book, which took four+ years to complete, synthesizes the research she and her team acquired from visiting “restrictive housing units” in more than 10 prisons across the country. She followed that work with a Federal Bureau of Justice Assistance fellowship where her team toured the country interviewing individuals working and living in prisons and jails about their perceptions of the environment, their mental and physical health, programs and training, and their ideas for reform. The team is currently working on several manuscripts from that work.
Not content to merely apply qualitative research in her own work, Professor Rudes is developing a Qualitative Methods Workshop Series as a recipient of a LSA Programming Grant. The quarterly, eight-session series is designed to fill in the gaps left by programs that relegate qualitative research methods to optional elective status or, in the case of many law schools, ignore empirical research methods altogether.
Each session will have an asynchronous and synchronous component. The asynchronous portions will feature Professor Rudes giving a mini-introductory lecture on the session topic. The follow-up synchronous portions will see Professor Rudes interviewing topic experts, likely in webinar format. In addition to receiving one or two readings prior to each session, participants will be able to talk through session topics and ask questions pertaining to their own work. All sessions will be recorded and available to LSA members.
To augment the virtual sessions, Professor Rudes will host events at the 2025 and 2026 LSA Annual Meetings. The 2025 event will be a meet-and-greet brainstorming and mentoring session, while the 2026 event will be a meeting for workshop participants who completed optional homework assignments. Three certificates of completion will be available:
- Introduction to Qualitative Methods (Workshops 1-4)
- Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis, and Writing (Workshops 5-8)
- Overall Certificate of Completion (All Workshops)
To support participants who want to continue their qualitative training, Professor Rudes is actively seeking additional grants to extend the workshop beyond two years and address more advanced techniques, theories, concepts, and tools such as the software Atlas.ti.
LSA members have been asking for more qualitative instruction for years, illuminating a key challenge that legal scholars face. Students working toward their JD are technically training to be attorneys, not researchers, so methodological training is almost completely off the table. Those working toward a joint JD/PhD don’t fare much better.
“On the PhD side you might have gotten a research methods class,” she explains, “but if you’re in political science, you’re probably not getting a qualitative methods class. If you’re in policy and government, you’re not getting a qualitative methods class. If you’re in sociology, and you’re a JD/PhD, there might be a requirement; but even at UC Irvine, qualitative methods in sociology was an elective, and there’s a law school there, so you might not do that.
“And given that you’re doing a joint degree program, you only have so many electives. You might be going for the more substantive electives in your field. If you’re studying, you know, housing policy, you might take a seminar in homelessness and poverty over the qualitative methods seminar, thinking, ‘I already got methods, why would I need an additional methods course?’”
This leaves legal and sociolegal scholars with next to no methods training, especially of the qualitative variety—which, in turn, may make them feel ill-prepared for attending conferences and participating in journal reviews that require them to understand how to evaluate, analyze, and understand qualitative scholarship.
“I think they [legal scholars] have a lot to offer in terms of policy and legal analysis, and with another set of tools in their toolbox–qualitative methods skills, which would include things like content analysis, or coding and analyzing word data as opposed to number data–I think the sky is the limit,” says Professor Rudes. “You could do so much great legal and policy analysis if you knew how to do that level of analysis.”
Beyond merely addressing knowledge gaps, the workshop series will continue, in an indirect sense, the work she began so long ago—the project of cultivating a sense of belonging in people eager to find their place within complex systems and environments. Conferences can be intimidating for even the most seasoned academics, but especially for young researchers, who may be too overcome with imposter syndrome to approach more established scholars. With the Qualitative Methods Workshop series, Professor Rudes hopes to provide scholars with an opportunity to connect with people at all stages of their careers, establishing a foundation for future communication, conversation, and even collaboration.
“The goal is to really bridge those gaps between the legal scholars and the social scientists,” she says, “so that we don’t see each other as different. We just see each other as all working toward the same greater good.”