ABSTRACT
The situational nature of everyday life has been dealt with in the naturalistic sociologies and the phenomenological philosophies of everyday life primarily in terms of physical situations of activities and the integrity of the situation. For several fundamental reasons, sociology, like all disciplines that purport to be theoretical and applied sciences of human action, necessarily begins and ends with the understanding of everyday life. Most sociologists of everyday life rejected these distorting assumptions and the methods growing out of them, but in doing so tended to neglect all consideration of “objectivity.” The situational phenomenological sociologists have been more consistently concerned with getting at the members’ meanings and seeing how they are related to the members’ actions. The field research methods of the various sociologies of everyday life have remained almost totally unexplicated and certainly untested by the repetition of the methods of observation to see if they yield comparable results.
