Becoming a “Trusted Outsider”: Gender, Ethnicity, and Inequality in Ethnographic Research

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that successful ethnographers strive for insider status and avoid being regarded as an outsider. Very often and especially within criminology, an ethnographer’s ability to gain the trust of research participants is linked to his or her degree of similarity to them, particularly with respect to gender. By describing the research dynamics between an all-male group of second-generation immigrants in Frankfurt/Germany, the “gatekeepers” and myself—a female researcher of different socioeconomic and ethnic background—I suggest that being an outsider in general and a female in particular is not a liability one necessarily needs to overcome. I propose that achieving status as an outsider trusted with “inside knowledge” may provide the ethnographer with a different perspective and different data than that potentially afforded by insider status.