2134/16634
Michael Mair
Michael
Mair
Christian Greiffenhagen
Christian
Greiffenhagen
Wes Sharrock
Wes
Sharrock
Statistical practice: putting society on display
Loughborough University
2015
Ethnomethodology
Knowledge
Quantitative-qualitative divide
Social life of methods
Statistics
Understanding
Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified
Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified
Sociology
2015-01-28 13:37:59
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Statistical_practice_putting_society_on_display/9473420
As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we
present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical
practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges
to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case
studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’,
here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting
understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’
(Garfinkel, 1967: 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings
rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’
into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good
statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical
forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study
is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which
studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.