Personal epiphanies, moral crises, curiosity, and passion combine to make insiders into outsiders, and vice versa, in combustible mixtures that emerge as research. It deals with this broad spectrum of everyday life over 26, relatively short, chapters and many chapters are from recognized, leading authors in the field of qualitative sociology. The intention of the book, to show how sociology and everyday life reflexively inform each other, is accomplished by the writer's beginning on a very personal note, which draws the reader's interest, and then shifting into the theoretical or, from the everyday to the sociological. While this is a stronger focus in earlier chapters, overall the book is a good introduction to what is required by the sociological imagination in qualitative research. However, this book also offers more experienced students, or researchers, one source that covers the potential diversity in qualitative methods, and symbolic interactionism.
Warnings arrive in the mail and, they are passed on by colleagues and neighbors.
From here she interrogates her everyday experience of warnings from a sociological position. She tells the personal story of her attendance at a workshop on racism and the memories it stirs up of her mother's determination that she should have a nose job. Through her participation in the workshop she recognized that her nose, and its distinctive qualities, had played a crucial role in her racial identity and her sensitivity to the issues of race. The second part of her contribution uses this example to discuss the difference between storytelling and telling a story from the field. The personal essay has a different standard of accuracy, and fieldwork stories need to tell about others, not the author.