Journal Article

Men and Their Moments: Character-Driven Ethnography and Interaction Analysis in a Park Basketball Rule Dispute

DeLand, Michael F.

2021

Overview

Both conversation-analytic and ethnographic studies of interaction tend to isolate situated conduct from the full biographical context that is meaningful to actors. This article argues that there are good analytic reasons to recover some of that biographical context by incorporating character-driven ethnographic representation within interactionist research. I make this case in reference to a rule dispute captured on video during an ethnography of a public park basketball game. Through a biographically contextualized analysis of players’ situated conduct, I show how character representation allows unspoken threads of actors’ lives to become analytic resources. Incorporating biographical context also opens a methodological path for interactionists to leverage the close-up study of situated encounters for empirical claims about broader forms of social organization. In this case, I argue that character-driven representation allows for an analysis that identifies rule disputes as an interactional mechanism of socially integrative park use.

• Publisher: SAGE Publications,American Sociological Association
• Subject: Basketball / Context / Conversation analysis / Disputes / Ethnography / Interaction analysis / Interaction Process Analysis / Personality / Qualitative research / Representation / Rules / Social integration / Social interaction / Social organization / Social psychology