The gathering of our data was subject to robust social scientific procedures of ethics, recruitment of participants, data analysis and data management.

Ethics

• • UCIP was subject to rigorous ethical evaluation prior to data collection.

• • This comprised approval via the Principal Investigator’s university Ethics Board to satisfy, inter alia, issues of informed consent, confidentiality, engaging with vulnerable respondents through sensitive questioning, data protection and risk assessments for prison-based research in line with the British Society of Criminology’s Statement of Ethics for Researchers.

Recruitment and sampling

• • Having identified prisons with diverse geographies in England, Switzerland and France with significant Muslim populations, the recruitment of participants was enabled through the research team spending intense induction periods of five research days in each establishment.

• • Prisoner respondents were recruited through a combination of publicising the research via distributing leaflets and in-person invitations at congregational prayers, religious classes and various work, training or education-based activities in each site. This was a broad recruitment strategy. Nevertheless, we are aware that it is possible that religiously committed Muslims were more likely to engage with our research than those with little interest in their faith.

• • Muslim chaplaincy teams and prison managers were instrumental in further publicising the research aims and encouraging prisoners and staff to participate.

• • The social scientific reader might observe that our sampling was therefore self-selected and not randomised. This is true and an inevitable product of the ethical requirement to gain informed, consenting volunteers in the prison environment.

• • Our sample of 279 prisoner respondents represents, to our knowledge, the largest body of Muslim prisoners who have yet engaged in academic research.

• • Moreover, as we explain in Chapter 2, we believe that our sample is ‘characteristic’ of the general Muslim prison populations of England, Switzerland and France.

• • Our sample also represents a large proportion (circa 35 per cent) of the available registered Muslim prisoner population of our sample of prisons.