Certainly, I have never sat down to write systematically about how to study society. I am suspicious of any method said to be the one and only. But among the methods I should recommend is the intensive, penetrating look with an imagination as lively and as sociological as it can be made. One of my basic assumptions is that if one quite clearly sees something happen once, it is almost certain to have happened again and again. The burden of proof is on those who claim a thing once seen is an exception; if they look hard, they may find it everywhere, although with some interesting differences in each case. (Hughes 1984, xviii-xix).