ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author outlines the research process, specifically the methodological choices made over the course of the study and the implications such choices had for the way she handled the data. She also outlines the reader on a retrospective voyage of the research process, the destination being the point where the methodological questions raised by ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman. The author attempts to specify the formal features of the texts before moving to their interpretation. Various writers on the qualitative research process and on discourse analysis have produced lists of 'rules' of qualitative research which convey the central principles of qualitative research. The process of reading the data, of reading and reading once more, is a central feature of qualitative research. Ethnomethodology is neither a theory nor a method in the conventional sociological sense. The central analytical concern of ethnomethodology is oriented to the question of how the social order is produced or 'accomplished' by members' activities.
