METHODOLOGY

Getting In

My previous association with anti-racist skinheads in other Canadian cities, as well as personal relationships I have formed with current members of SHARP (as my neighbours, former roommates and as people I know from the Montréal punk rock music scene), permitted me to gain access to the group with relative ease. I discussed the possibility of doing some research with three members of SHARP in December 1999. In January 2000, I was invited to a meeting, where I explained to all present what I wanted to do, that their confidentiality would be maintained, and that all that I required was their consent to study them. At the next SHARP meeting, they voted to approve my research plan.

Participant Observation and Intensive Interviewing

I chose to combine the methods of participant observation and intensive interviewing in the hopes of yielding a rich and meaningful set of data from my interactions with the subjects. After devising an interview schedule, I began what was to become an two year regimen of participant observation and intensive interviewing of members. From February 2000 to January 2002, I frequented the same bars as they did, attended the same concerts they went to, and attended meetings of the group. I visited members in their homes and invited members to visit me in my home. I was invited to and attended birthday parties, barbeques and other social events. I also went along with them on several planned "actions" against racist skinheads. In doing so, I sought to find out about their reasons for becoming skinheads and SHARP skinheads in particular. I was interested in their knowledge of the subculture and their perspectives on themselves and on other kinds of skinheads. I wanted to observe their interactions with non-skinheads and with members of other skinhead factions. I was particularly interested in uncovering what role violence played in these interactions and in their own self-conceptions as SHARP skinheads.

From a sampling pool of about a dozen SHARP members fluent enough in English for me to conduct meaningful interviews with I extracted several initial and follow-up interviews over the course of two years.. The initial interviews ran between one and two hours, with subsequent follow-up interviews running at less than an hour. I also interviewed some former members of SHARP, other Montréal skinheads and particpants in the Montréal punk scene who frequently interacted with members of SHARP. I combined data obtained from these interviews with my field notes and with secondary sources often provided to me by members of SHARP.

Research Limitations

Montréal is a wonderful city for all sorts of social research, but a largely-unilingual researcher is at a definite disadvantage. My lack of fluency in French limited my choices of SHARP members to interview to about half the group. It also created some difficulty in following and interpreting conversations and actions observed in the field at times. Safety considerations disqualified doing any ethnographic work on racist skinheads in Montréal. Finally, SHARP Montréal or the Montréal skinhead subculture is not necessarily representative of the subculture elsewhere. In fact, given the myriad differences between my conclusions and those of researchers investigating other skinheads in other parts of the continent, it is likely that my findings are specific to the group of anti-racist skinheads portrayed in this study and evidence that the skinhead subculture is heterogeneous and varies considerably from group to group and city to city.