Estado de México

member.Another way membership was accomplished within the interviews was

through the use of humour and laughter and this use of non-seriousness will be examined. In the final part of the chapter, the emphasis will shift to using

ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to explorematters pertaining to doing

interviews. In particular, the focus will be on how the interaction is accomplished as a research interview.

6.2

Being a member and the unique adequacy requirement of

methods

There are two forms of unique adequacy: the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong use’, as discussed earlier in the methodology chapter. To recap, in the ‘weak’ use, the researcher must become a ‘vulgarly competent’ member (Garfinkel 2002 p.175). Thus, to study social workers, a researcher would need to become vulgarly

competent in social work. This is identical to the ethnographer becoming a marginal native in order to study some group or culture. It is in the ‘strong’ use of unique adequacy that ethnomethodology goes one step further than ethnographic studies. In ethnomethodological research, the researcher maintains ethnomethodological indifference and thus should not make any judgement on the adequacy, value or

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importance of the interaction (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970 p.166). Furthermore, the ‘classic methods’ of professional sociology are not necessary as the focus of the research is solely on members’ methods (Garfinkel 2002 p.170). Unique adequacy is fundamental to ethnomethodology. Garfinkel specified that:

It is Ethnomethodological about EM studies that they show for ordinary society’s substantive events, in material contents, just and only in any actual case, that and just how vulgarly competent members concert their activities to produce and show, exhibit, make observably the case,

demonstrate, etc., coherence, cogency, analysis, detail, structure, consistency, order, meaning, mistakes, errors, coincidence, facticity, reason, methods – locally, reflexively, naturally accountable phenomena – in and as of the haecceities of their ordinary lives together. (Garfinkel 2002 p.191)

This focus exclusively on the developing interaction between members is at the core of ethnomethodological research. The members of an interaction are concerned with making their actions ‘accountable’, recognisable for the action it is. For

example, that they are doing ‘being ironic’ rather than ‘being serious’. Accountability is closely linked with ‘reflexivity’. This does not have the same meaning as in many social work textbooks. For Garfinkel (1967 p.8), reflexivity refers to the constituent features of the settings that are made observable. In this way, ‘actions do not merely communicate information to others… they always accomplish something socially’ (Dennis et al. 2013 p.52).

Unlike a researcher who has to become uniquely adequate in the weak sense prior to or during the research process, as a social work member with over ten years post- qualifying experience, I was already vulgarly competent. Rather than spending time meeting this unique adequacy requirement, I naturally accomplished doing being a social worker in the research interviews. Indeed, during the fieldwork stage, this was so natural that the accomplishment was unconscious. Thus, when I thought that I was undertaking narrative interviews, in actuality the interviews can be seen as ‘an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life, with the ordinary, artful ways of that accomplishment being by members known, used, and taken for

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granted’ (Garfinkel 1967 p.vii). This made a profound impact on the research. Being a member or more accurately, being oblivious to the ethnomethodological

implications of being a member, means that I am fundamentally part of the data. Researchers enter into their ethnomethodological studies as a researcher. While they may learn and/or observe, they always have the social and intellectual ‘distance’ described by Hammersley and Atkinson (2007 p.90) earlier; the space where the analytic work of the ethnographer is achieved. Of course, the danger here was that I might not able to achieve this ‘distance’. It has certainly been the case that, at times, I did struggle on a both practical and emotional level during the research process. Having a non-social work supervisor for the final year of my doctorate, which happily coincided with the writing of the thesis, has been invaluable in creating distance from the unseen elements of being a member. For example, when writing about AMHP work, initially I did not make any attempt to clarify being on AMHP duty from the more general social work role of the AMHP. I implicitly assumed that this was ‘obvious’.

Being a member has also had an emotional impact. On one occasion when writing this thesis, I reacted when writing about what two of the participants had told me. I was writing about social workers having to prioritise bureaucratic demands over the needs of the service user. I wrote:

This is a complete reversal of one of the core value of social work, empowering service users, and providing a needs-led service (NHS and Community Care Act 1990). This means that the focus of work is on the needs of the computer and not on the needs of the service user. It is a shocking indictment of social work practice.

Fortunately (if somewhat embarrassingly for me), my non-social work supervisor was quick to pick up on what he called ‘bleeding heart hyperbole’ and ask ‘what happened to EM indifference on this page?’. The analytic distance had disappeared and my views had become enmeshed with those expressed by the participant. I was unable to maintain ethnomethodological indifference in terms of abstaining from

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judging the adequacy and value of what the interviewees told me. Being a member also led to the feeling of having a ‘dirty secret’ which was discussed earlier in the methodology chapter. It also led to a feeling of ‘transgressing the official line’.