Abstract
Imagine that you are interested in investigating suicide. You want to find out what people think about suicide, why people commit suicide, what implications it has for their family and friends, how it could have been prevented, what could a study add to current knowledge to ensure that people at risk of committing suicide get the help that they need. If you follow the advice of many of the chapters in this book you will, quite legitimately, generate a methodology for investigating this topic, perhaps using a survey or conducting interviews and then analyse these to draw out themes and inferences. What we want to do in this chapter is to introduce you to a completely different way of doing research that looks very much like mainstream social scientific approaches, but relies on a simple, yet fundamental, shift in thinking about researching social life. In this chapter we will introduce you to that ‘shift’ – an ethnomethodological approach to social life – and then outline two associated methodologies: conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, which have their origins in the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks. We will explain what they are and why they are important. However, one of the key things about both of these approaches is their practical application, so in the fourth section of the chapter we will provide a detailed analysis of a piece of data to illustrate the points we have been making. There will also be questions related to these approaches, for you to test your knowledge and some suggestions for possible projects and recommendations for further reading.