Ethnomethodology Term Papers
Developed by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s, ethnomethodology studies the ways people make sense of their social world. Whereas other sociologists assume the social world is orderly in its basic nature, ethnomethodology is based on the opposite assumption; namely, there is no such thing as social order. All social situations thus have the potential to produce chaos and disorder.
According to Garfinkel, then, social disorder, such as youth violence, still contains its own set of social facts and patterns. They make sense to those who are involved in them, even though other segments of society see the actions and behaviors as deviant, dangerous, and destructive. Garfinkel further found that young people whose behavior was seen as deviant by society in general were actually constructing their own social realities to make sense of their actions and justify them to themselves and to others.
Ethnomethodology, then, concerns itself with the methods people use to accomplish and justify their social actions and interactions. What we might see as wrong, the young person who is practicing criminal or gang activity, or who is committing violence against peers and others, sees such behavior as “normal”.
Practitioners of ethnomethodology use a concept they call indexicality, which states that all human interpretive work is bound to the context in which it occurs. For example, a teenager committing an armed robbery interprets his action as justified, and so his indexicality becomes one in which deviance (which he does not see to be so) is acceptable. Conversely, to the teenager who hits the books night after night as he or she tries to get into a good college, his or her indexicality is one of “mainstream” actions, in accordance with accepted societal views.
Another aspect of ethnomethodology is called documentary interpretation. Here, information about the person – physical appearance, such as dress, body language, and so forth; attitudes; even police records and school reports – are used by the ethnomethodology sociologists to dig through to find deeper patterns and structures of behavior and its causes. This is particularly true when studying youthful behavior that is inappropriate. One problem, as mentioned above, is that the deviant youth feels his behavior is “normal” and he is merely following his own course in life, though perhaps greatly influenced by others, who act the same way.Order your custom Ethnomethodology sociology term papers today...Place Order Here!
Custom Ethnomethodology Term Papers
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