Investigating the Social World
Practice Exercises
1. Attend a sports game as an ethnomethodologist seeking to understand how fans construct their sense of the reality of the game. Write up your analysis and circulate it for criticism.
2. Write a narrative in class about your first date, car, college course, or something else that you and your classmates agree on. Then collect all the narratives and analyze them in a “committee of the whole.” Follow the general procedures discussed in the example of narrative analysis in this chapter.
3. Go forth and take pictures! Conduct a photo voice project with your classmates and write up your own review of the group’s discussion of your pictures.
4. Review one of the articles on this site that used qualitative methods. Describe the data that were collected, and identify the steps used in the analysis. What type of qualitative data analysis was this? If it is not one of the methods presented in this chapter, describe its similarities to and differences from one of these methods. How confident are you in the conclusions, given the methods of analysis used?
5. Complete the Interactive Exercise for Chapter 11.