The Research Act

For research/methods essay of M. Phil.

Bibliographic Deets
The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. Norman K. Denzin. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. 1989.

Overview

 * Massive survey of approaches to research in the social sciences.

Interpretative Point of View

 * "The sociological enterprise rests on three interrelated activities: theory, research, and substantive interest" (1)
 * First-order concepts -> "the language of everyday life" // second-order concepts -> "abstract and sociological in nature" (9)

The Sociological Interview
"A good interviewer is by necessity also a participant observer. That is, the interviewer is participating in the life experiences of a given respondent and is observing that person's report of herself during the interview conversation." (118)
 * "the interview" as the "favorite 'digging tool' of the sociologist." (102)
 * "The interview is like a conversation. A coversation is a give-and-take between two persons." (102)
 * But "the interview is beset with other problems." b/c it is "ongoing interaction" controlled by "ettiquette" and "gendered" thus it happens within social structures/organizations/behaviors, about those things (103).
 * "I wish to call attention to the tremendous variability in the interview situation" (119) -> non-homogenous

Participant Observation

 * "Participant observers and ethnographers write culture... They create, through their ethnographic practices, the worlds they study and then write about." (156-157)
 * "Thick description (from Geertz and Denzin) is interpretative. It captures the meanings persons to their experiences." (159)
 * Ethnographies are not "windows" into another culture, nor are they "travelogues" or "fictions" but rather "'tales from the field' and must be read as one author's version of what he experienced and then wrote about." (180)

Back to At Cambridge