Research on burglary at the end of the millennium: a grounded approach to understanding crime

This article traces the history of research on residential burglary in Britain, Ireland and the United States. It demonstrates how, without necessarily setting out to do so, researchers in this field have adopted a grounded approach to the problem. They have allowed the expert in the chosen field, the residential burglar, to lead the course of the enquiry, yielding a rich and increasingly focused understanding of the subject. The paper sets out to show how, in the field of academic criminology and crime prevention, we ignore the offender's perspective at our peril.