ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a broadly symbolic interactionist perspective in the collection and interpretation of data. An important point is that early anthropologists and ethnographers almost certainly gave little thought to such procedural matters. The emphasis was on description of the social context they studied, and little or no claim was made to the generation or testing of formal theory. Probably in order to defend qualitative research from such criticism, substantial energy was put by some workers into developing procedures for analysis of data which would at least demonstrate how interpretations were derived. The random sampling approach is necessary when some claim to statistical representativeness of wider populations is to be made, in which case the necessary sample size and appropriate inferential statistics are also required. The recording of data is itself an aspect of the analysis. Inevitably choices are made about which data to observe, and which to remember, and then which to write down, and in what way.
