By Avery Myles, University of Strathclyde

There is a particular flavour of silence that greets a researcher who has built something beautiful, put it out into the world, and heard, in return, nothing back. Not a maybe. Not a gentle no. Just the low hum of an inbox that refuses to fill, week after week, until you start checking it not out of hope, but out of habit; the way you might press a bruise to see if it still hurts. 

I study how, when, and from whom children come to learn – or do not – that someone in their family was sent to prison. It is, by its very nature, a population that does not want to be found. Families managing the knowledge of a loved one’s imprisonment are often doing so under a code of silence that takes real and continued effort to construct and maintain: silence with the community, silence in the queue at the shops, and the implementation of alternate, fanciful realities to explain away a child’s grief. Some children are never told the truth, either finding out on their own, or be left in this liminal space of stories and silence. 

So when I set out to recruit, I was not naïve about the difficulty. I knew this would be slow. I knew I would have to earn trust rather than assume it. I knew I would have to forge relationships with a population yet ungathered. What I did not fully reckon with was the particular, specific ache of doing everything “right” and still ending up with N=0.

I tried to build a study that met people where they were, rather than where a methods textbook assumed they would be. Interviews, yes, but also provided options for participants to write, in their own time, in their own words, using whatever structure, manner or length felt bearable. Creative prompts for those for whom neither speech nor prose felt like the right vessel for something this loaded; with no fixed idea that their experiences or memory had to arrive as a tidy narrative arc. With acknowledgement that the secrecy itself disrupts continuity; and that this disruption is built into someone’s very capacity to engage. 

I wanted a study that could hold silence as data, hesitation as data, confusion as data. That could make room for scribbles in a corner, a line from a song, a newspaper clipping long since printed; the kind of fragments only a topic this layered and this raw could even begin to produce. Trauma-informed was not some checkbox on an ethics form; it was the whole architecture. I was, to momentarily set aside modesty, rather proud of it. It felt like the kind of design that would allow this hidden population speak in whatever register they had available to them.

And then … nothing. Or near enough to nothing that “nothing” is the honest word. Gatekeepers who never replied. Recruitment routes that closed without a sound. The increasingly maddening asymmetry of a topic important enough to justify a whole PhD and yet too sensitive, too dangerous, too shameful, too something for anyone to risk putting their stories in a room with me. I had built a door with every possible key hanging beside it, and still no one walked through. 

Here is the part that took me longest to admit: N=0 is not proof that the question does not matter, that the design was wrong, or that I failed at the one thing I was supposed to be able to do. Recruitment failure in prison-related research is so often read – by panels, by funders, sometimes by ourselves in the wee hours – as a personal shortcoming, a failure of persistence or charm or means. But when your population is one which is actively stigmatised and obsessively hidden – sometimes even from themselves – this absence, in and of itself, is the finding. It tells you something true and important about the weight of the secrecy you are studying. The silence is not a gap in your data, and certainly not a gap in your capability. In a strange, backwards way, it is your data.

What I have left is by no means the study I planned. It is a study about why the study I planned could not be done as planned. It is about gatekeeping, about protective instincts, about shame, and grief, and pain – and, importantly, about who gets to decide if a researcher is safe enough to see any of it. That is a smaller, stranger, less clean piece of knowledge than the one I initially set out to sculpt. But I no longer think of it as a lesser one.

So if you are early in your own prison-related research project, staring down at an inbox that refuses to ping; remember, your N=0 is not the end. It might just be the study, unbidden, showing you its actual shape. Reforming in a way you could not have foreseen, from where you were standing when you designed it.

Avery Myles is a PhD researcher whose work centres on the stigma of imprisonment and the secrecy families often employ to manage it, focusing on the perspectives of children who have a family member in prison. This research aims to provide a platform for voices too often left out of research, policy, and practice, and to generate recommendations that can be embedded in prison visitor centres and other organisations supporting families affected by imprisonment. Avery can be reached at avery.hudman@strath.ac.uk