Week 4: Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory

Week 4: Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory

Jackie Clark, Qual 8400

I began this weeks reading with Prasad, who continues to be written in an easy to understand style. I find her organization of ideas and supportive literature comprehensive and conversational. It's also very helpful to have the chapter summary with important concepts to use for referral. I am starting to grasp the historic figures in context, although it is still challenging to keep track of them all in historic frameworks. Introductory remarks about the interpretive traditions helped me understand how these different ways of describing the world are connected and how they are all grounded in a social construction of reality and a subjectivity of experience. Combining this reading with the chapter by Rock, it seems clear that no matter how carefully considered a qualitative research project is, the researcher must constantly consider the completely unique character of the study. Because participants, time, context, and the researcher are always changing, there is basically no way to replicate a study in reality. This makes it essential to be able to write well, and address the changing nature of the study over time. 

The chapter on symbolic interactionism was my favorite, I think because it seemed so logical and "real" to me. I immediately thought of the way Americans attach symbolism to various objects and how this social construction of meaning goes deep. We construct whole parts of our identity around objects, from our gender to our SES, objects are inextricably tied to our identity only because of the social context. I was thinking about any number of contexts, like school systems, social groups, religious groups, all full of symbolic interaction. The recent national conversation over the confederate flag seems to be a perfect example of the complexity of social construction of meaning. This is why it is so difficult to talk about, because it cannot be reduced to one simple meaning, agreed upon by all. Depending on your family history, race, SES, etc...you may have strong connections to this symbol or see it as a nothing more than a historic artifact. 

Dramaturgy and Dramatist were a bit more challenging to grasp, being totally new terms and frameworks to me. However, they did seem to uncover a totally different aspect of our human experience. The way in which we all "play roles" in a larger drama is meaningful. I completely understand and agree with the concept that we all have an outer self and an inner self, but I would challenge the authors simplicity in this section. I think we all have carefully crafted outer selves that conform with what society finds acceptable. And there is great risk in choosing not to conform. The ways in which we perform gender, sexuality, work norms, etc....are controlled by the social construction that serves us best. I am sure Sociologists have written extensively on these concepts, and how to some extent we all keep up outer selves so that society can be "civil" and how quickly these outer selves will fall apart when emergencies happen, or resources are scarce. 

Finally, as a student of Sociology in my undergraduate career, I am most familiar with Ethnography. This methodology has a long history, and of course, one that is mired in colonialism and white supremacy. It is in itself a great example of the importance of context and time. We can be duly critical in 2015 of work done decades ago, but situating that work in it's own time and social location changes it's meaning. This framework is unique in that it seems as important to trouble past studies, and look at them through new lenses as it is to conduct new studies. 

The additional articles were helpful in more fully describing both symbolic interactionism as an ethnographic technique, and the use of SI in an actual study. Rock's piece was rich in description of the actual experience of the researcher, and it made the experience much more real to me that just a list of steps and directions. He seemed to have a humor to his work, which again, made it seem more accessible to the novice researcher. The study on self-injury was interesting, but I thought it lacked a good methodology section that really connected SI to the study design. It's possible I simply don't understand it well enough, but that was challenging for me to understand. The actual methods he used were not hard to understand, nor were his conclusions, just the framework and grounding of the study in SI.