Thursday, January 17, 2008

[USA] Tell Me about the Test: The Construction of Truth and Lies in Drug Court
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 36, No. 3, 223-251 (2007)
http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/3/223
Mitchell B. Mackinem ; Paul Higgins
"Through a multiyear participant observation study in three southeastern drug courts, we explore how staff members react to clients' responses when confronted with positive tests for illicit drug use. Within their professional beliefs about drug addiction, treatment, and testing, staff members interpret the clients' responses as truths or lies, though some lies are worse than others and some truths are better than others. To understand how staff members produce organisational outcomes as they manage clients, interpretive studies that look beyond the most public arenas of drug and other problem courts need to be conducted as they have been in exploring other service agencies."
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