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

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.