Abstract
This chapter is a joint production bringing together a PhD supervisor and post-PhD early career researcher focused on exploring Herbert G. Blumer’s (1969 [1954]) ‘sensitizing concepts’ developed within the symbolic interactionist approach. Our sensitizing concepts are intimacy, exchange, and friendship, which form the basis to understand and interpret data from a series of ethnographic studies on young people and subcultures. We look across our separate research studies and research sites and select examples from fieldwork as part of a joint research imaginary that brings together sociological analysis and the teaching of subcultures.
On this basis, we suggest that sensitizing concepts