[7][8] Wright has published widely in the area of offender decision-making, with particular focus on urban street criminals, including residential burglars,[9] armed robbers, carjackers, and drug dealers.
His qualitative research is a derivative of ethnography, and notable for its use of semi-structured interviews with active offenders, a technique not widely used in the social sciences because of the challenges associated with recruiting and working with noninstitutionalized street criminals.
[10] This work has made him the de facto founder of the "St. Louis School" of criminological research,[11][12] an inductive reasoning approach which focuses on the cognitive, affective, and situational dynamics inherent in the foreground of crime rather than the background explanations (race, sex, poverty, etc.)
These include his best known works, Armed Robbers in Action and Burglars on the Job (both co-authored with Scott Decker), which won the 1994-95 Outstanding Scholarship in Crime and Delinquency Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
These, as well as his co-authored books with Bruce Jacobs (Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld)[14] and Scott Jacques (Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers)[15] are noteworthy for their reliance on interviews with active offenders.