ON THE RETRIEVAL OF SOCIOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS: RESPONDENT VALIDATION AND THE CRITICAL CASE OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

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Abstract
Our concern in this article is with the feeding back of sociological descriptions to those whom these descriptions purport to be about. This in particular is what we mean in our title by the ‘retrieval of sociological description’. We would like to consider here some of the issues surrounding any attempt on the part of the sociologist to offer his account for inspection by his research respondents, why one may attempt such an exercise and, tentatively, what any such exercise might look like. In particular, we wish to link such ‘feeding back’ of the sociologist's descriptions to the related issue of the validation of social research. Conventionally, validation of sociological research is thought to consist in internal methodological procedures, e.g. triangulation, random allocation, etc., but validation by respondents may represent a feasible alternative to such procedures. By respondent validation is meant here any attempt on the part of the researcher to establish a