Chapter 11: Theory development Studying events in their natural settings.

The article explains the relevance of qualitative research for theory development by studying events in their natural settings. Knowing the context is likewise the only way to infer the meaning read into more complex social situations. Everyone acknowledges that no method can deal with more than a tiny fragment of reality. Thus, survey texts focus on sampling, on how to select respondents sufficiently representative to reflect the distribution of responses in the society at large. Multiple observation is the more appropriate technique for studying events that occur in well-defined settings, are clearly bounded in time and space, and replicate essentially the same relationship. The first and most obvious among these enumerations are visual cues as to the identity of participants. An on-the-spot survey might be too distracting. But estimates of age, sex, and racial compositions can be made at a glance. Mass observation certainly lends itself to a "debunking," a scaling down of what the mass media accounts blow up out of proportion, or as an authentication of the view "from below" against the tide of "pseudo-events."