Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar - Laboratory Life ... - Pedro P. Ferreira

adoption of "themes" is highly problematic. For example, the way in which the theme isselected can be held to bear upon the validity of his explanation; the observer's selection of atheme constitutes his method for which he is accountable. It is not enough simply to fabricateorder out of an initially chaotic collection of observations; the observer needs to be able todemonstrate that this fabrication has been done correctly, or, in short, that his method is valid.One of the many possible schemes designed to meet criteria of validity holds that descriptionsof social phenomena should be deductively derived from theoretical systems and subsequentlytested against empirical observations. In particular, it is important that testing be carried out inisolation from the circumstances in which the observations were gathered. On the other hand,it is argued that adequate descriptions can only result from an observer's prolongedacquaintance with behavioural phenomena. Descriptions are adequate, according to thisperspective, in the sense that they emerge during the course of techniques such as participantobservation. The((38))descriptions thus produced, it is argued, are more likely to find some measure of congruencewith the set of categories and concepts of participants under study. This latter version ofadequate sociological method enjoys a number of variations, ranging from Glaser and Strauss'(1968) notion of "grounded theory" to the dictum of "phenomenologically oriented" sociologythat investigators should "be true to the data" (see, for example, Tudor, 1976). The schemewhich favours the deductive production of independently testable descriptions is orientedtowards what has been called etic validation (Harris, 1968), that is, the audience who willultimately assess the validity of a description is a community of fellow observers. The mainadvantage of this scheme is the comparative ease with which the reliability and replicabilityof descriptions can be assessed. By contrast, the scheme which favours the "emergence" ofphenomenologically informed descriptions of social behaviour is most appropriatelyamenable to emic validation, that is, the ultimate decision about the adequacy of descriptionrests with participants themselves. This has the advantage that descriptions produced by anobserver are less likely to be mere impositions of categories and concepts which are alien toparticipants. At the same time, however, descriptions based on the categorical systems ofparticipants in particular situations can provide problems for their generalisation to othersituations. Further-more, the observer remains accountable to a community of fellowobservers in the sense that they provide a check that he has correctly followed procedures foremic validation.This simplistic distinction between methods for making sense of observations scarcely doesjustice to the range of methodological positions and debates current within sociology.Nevertheless, it helps clarify the diversity of approaches which can be adopted in the study of