Alice Goffman Case Essay

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Alice Goffman Case
In her book “On the Run,” Alice Goffman discusses the lives that black men in West Philadelphia have to live. Goffman’s problem statement in the book is that a group of young black men in a mixed income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, some of them low-­level drug dealers, live under constant threat of arrest and cycle in and out of prison (Lewis-Kraus, 2016). Goffman spent more than six years studying this group of individuals when she moved into their neighborhood to get first-hand information. Therefore, the primary research method that she used for her study was interviews.
Goffman interviewed various individuals in the neighborhood and spent long hours transcribing conversations from the field notes as they happened in real life. From her research, she proved that this group of individuals are faced with a constant threat of arrest. For example, she mentioned that she witnessed a black man being arrested in a hospital beside his girlfriend, who had just given birth.
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