ACCOUNTS

Accounts focus on
 language in context
 Speech acts
 Ethnomethodology
 Conversation analysis
 Discourse analysis
 Ethnographic paradigm: see situations through
the eyes of participants, their intentionality and
their interpretations of situations, their meaning
systems and the dynamics of the interaction as it
unfolds.
 THE ETHOGENIC APPROACH
 Concentrates upon the meaning system, the
sequence by which a social act is achieved.
 Concerned with speech which accompanies
action.
 Ethogenic studies make use of commonsense
understandings of the social world.
 The ethogenic study employs an ongoing
observational approach that focuses upon
processes rather than products.
CHARACTERISTICS OF ACCOUNTS
AND EPISODES
 The total pattern of choice
 Similarities and differences
 Grouping items together
 Categorization of content
 Tracing a theme
 The study of omissions
 Reconstruction of a social life world
 Generating and testing hypothesis
NETWORK ANALYSIS
 There are structural regularities – regular
patterns) – in social relations between entitities
 These macro-structural relations influence
people’s agentic decisions, actions, values and
behaviours.
 Network analysis is an attempt to measure and
chart these, e.g. through graphic means.
 Relations are context-specific and dynamic.

 Two main components:

 Actors
 Relations
NETWORK ANALYSIS
 The units (the actors)
 The relational form

Dyads, triads, stars, chains etc.

The nature of the relationship
The strength, intensity and frequency of the
relationship
 The relational content

 The type of tie

 The level of data analysis

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
 The organization of ordinary talk and
everyday explanations and the social actions
performed in them.
 Discourses are sets of linguistic material that
are coherent in organization and content and
enable people to construct meaning in social
contexts.
 Speech acts: utterances express content and
intentions.
 Talk as contextualized dialogue.
ANALYZING SOCIAL EPISODES
 Quantitative analysis
 Factor analysis
 Linkage analysis
 Multidimensional measurement
 Cluster analysis
 Qualitative analysis
 Coding
 Classifying
PROBLEMS IN GATHERING AND
ANALYZING ACCOUNTS
Many meanings present in a social
episode
Actors may have biased meanings
Whose meaning(s) predominate/are
valid and reliable