Definitions for "Ethnomethodology"
Keywords: garfinkel, harold, sociological, everyday, paton
Related Terms: Interpretivism, Participant observation, Ethnography, Functionalism, Social sciences, Ethnographic research, Social constructionism, Culture, Sociology, Case study, Science, Etic, Qualitative research, Structuralism, Emic, Social science, Cultural competency, Social psychology, Social structure, Cultural anthropology, Organizational culture, Paradigm, Socialization, Positivism, Enculturation, Epistemology, Anthropologist, Ethnology, Social system, Social role, Cultural relativism, Grounded theory, Social cognition, Analysis, Qualitative methods, Ideology, Ethnoarchaeology, Sociobiology, Counterculture, Social comparison theory, Reification, Scientific theory, Paradigm, Conflict theory, Reflexivity, Analysis, Cultural competence, Social competence, Social control
An approach to the study of social phenomena which employs procedures to discover how people make sense and give order to the world. It emphasizes the contextual determination of meaning and concentrates on the unique and the idiographic. It does not accept the possibility of generalization. Qualitative techniques are employed such as participant observation, analysis of official records, naturalistic observation, etc.
involves the examination of the ways in which people produce orderly social interaction on a routine, everyday basis. It provides the theoretical underpinning for conversation analysis.
Generally means 'peoples methods'. It is a critique of mainstream sociology which imposes a set of sociological categories on the ordinary person.
"How do people make sense of their everyday activities so as to behave in socially acceptable ways?" (Paton, 1990, p88)
cerg.csse.monash.edu.au
A form of ethnography that studies activities of group members to see how they make sense of their surroundings
The field of study, founded by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the early 1960s, that investigates the ways in which people make sense of their social world; uses conversation analysis as one of its primary tools.
Ethnomethodology (literally, 'the study of people's (folk) methods') is a sociological discipline which focuses on the ways in which people make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live. The term was initially coined by Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s.