ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the data to be considered in the rest of the report and provides an initial description of those data to facilitate their subsequent treatment. It considers a long transcript of staff making decisions about a number of patients in a large English hospital. These staff work in the ‘Stroke Unit’, a department that deals only with patients who have had cardiovascular accidents, and require therapeutic interventions to prepare them to leave hospital. The chapter considers some of the issues in relation to the question of how sociological studies should be pursued in an ethnomethodological mode. The fundamental issue that needs to be addressed is whether sociological studies are made more rigorous, easier or more analytically powerful by adopting the ‘newer’ ethnomethodological concepts and methodological innovations Lynch powerfully argues the case for.
