Example
Investigating the conduct of jury members, an ethnomethodologist would seek to describe the commonsense methods through which members of a jury produce themselves in a jury room as jurors: methods for establishing matters of fact; methods for developing evidence chains; methods for determining the reliability of witness testimony; methods for establishing the hierarchy of speakers in the jury room; methods for determining the guilt or innocence of defendants, etc. (see Garfinkel:1967). Such methods, taken individually, in combination, or collectively, depending on the scope of the investigation, would serve to constitute the social order of being a juror for the participants, and researcher(s), in that specific social setting . For the ethnomethodologist, participants bring order to social settings - make them orderable - through the sense making activities of their shared methods and practices as witnessably enacted in those settings.
In this way, ethnomethodology points to a broad and multi-faceted area of inquiry. John Heritage writes, “In it’s open-ended reference to any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory.”
Read more about this topic: Ethnomethodology
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