ACCOUNTS

© LOUIS COHEN, LAWRENCE MANION & KEITH MORRISON

STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER• Characteristics of the ethogenic approach• Characteristics of accounts and episodes • Procedures in eliciting, analyzing and authenticating

accounts• Network analysis• Discourse analysis• Analyzing social episodes• Account gathering in educational research• Problems in gathering and analyzing accounts • Handling quantitative and qualitative accounts• Strengths and weaknesses of ethogenic approaches• A note on stories

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• Synchronic analysis: the analysis of social

practices and institutions as they exist at any one time

• Diachronic analysis: the study of stages/processes by which social practices and institutions are created and abandoned, change and are changed.

THE ETHOGENIC APPROACH• Concentrates upon the meaning system, the

sequence by which a social act is achieved. • Concerned with speech which accompanies

action. • Founded upon the view that humans tend to be

the kinds of person that their language, traditions, tacit and explicit knowledge tell them they are.

• 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

• Accounts must be seen within the context of social episodes.

• Accounts serve to explain our past, present and future oriented actions.

PROCEDURES IN ELICITING, ANALYZING AND AUTHENTICATING ACCOUNTS

• Attention to informants, the account-gathering situation, the transformation of accounts and researchers’ accounts, and control procedures

• Eliciting, analyzing and authenticating accounts

• Experience-sampling: a qualitative technique for gathering and analyzing accounts based on interviews that were themselves prompted by given situations

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 ADDRESSES . . .

• 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– Within-site and cross-site analysis

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