Revision summary
Garfinkel studies members’ methods, indexicality, and accountability. That can validate how categories are produced, including official ones. Reliability of national rates needs stable instruments such as Census and NFHS. Cicourel links ethnomethodology to the making of statistics. Justify: yes for interactional validity; no as a sole reliability design.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology studies the methods members use to produce a sense of orderly social fact. It can raise validity for meaning in situ. It is a weak tool if the aim is reliable population measurement.
Body
What it can validate
- Indexical talk and accountability show how a category such as “household” or “migrant” is done in interaction, which a Census cell conceals.
- Breaching experiments reveal the background expectancies that actors treat as natural. That is a validity check on the researcher’s prenotions, in Durkheim’s sense of discarding common-sense.
- Aaron Cicourel showed that official rates are assembled in offices. Ethnomethodology makes those assembly rules visible.
Where reliability fails
- Reliability needs stable instruments and repeatable coding. Garfinkel’s unique scenes and ad hocing do not yield test-retest scores like NFHS items.
- The findings travel poorly across settings unless they are turned into a documented method, not a one-off breach.
- The observer is inside the production of order, so another team may not recover the same transcript of “what happened”.
Justification
- Use it for valid reconstruction of members’ methods and for critique of official data.
- Do not use it alone for national rates. Mix it with standardised instruments when reliability of counts is the claim.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD EM[Ethnomethodology] --> VAL[Validity of members methods] EM --> REL[Weak population reliability] OFF[Official stats] --> CIC[Cicourel assembly] VAL --> MIX[Mixed with survey] REL[REL] --> MIX[MIX]
Conclusion
Ethnomethodology helps valid data on how people make social facts accountable. It does not, by itself, give reliable census-like series. Garfinkel and Cicourel justify a division of labour with survey method, not a replacement of it.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the challenges involved in collecting data through census method
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q1(c)). View answer →
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Is a breaching experiment a valid national sample?
No. It is a probe of expectancies. It is not a sampling design.
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Can ethnomethodology improve a census?
Yes, by studying how enumerators and respondents fill categories. It cannot count the country by itself.
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