David Silverman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Silverman |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Silverman |
| SIGNATURE | SILVERMAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6648-3098 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 550 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Heathen
Doing Qualitative Research
Qualitative Research
What Counts as Qualitative Research? Some Cautionary Comments
Многие докторанты (PhD students) неосознанно начинают как натуралисты или эмоционалисты. Они проводят исследования посредством интервью для выявления чувств и мнений людей по какой-либо очевидной проблеме. Анализ нескольких номеров одного журнала показал, что это наивное использование данных интервью стало общим местом качественных исследований. Критикуя одну из таких статей, я продемонстрирую, как исследования, основанные на интервью, порой прос…
Agency and clientship in public encounters
This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co‐constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview‐based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video‐recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness…
Introduction
How was it for you? The Interview Society and the irresistible rise of the (poorly analyzed) interview
Atkinson and Silverman's (1997) depiction of the Interview Society analysed the dominance of interview studies that seek to elicit respondents 'experiences' and 'perceptions'. Their article showed that this vocabulary is deeply problematic, assuming an over-rationalistic account of behaviour and a direct link between the language of people's accounts and their past and present psychic states. In this article, using a Constructionist approach, I d…
Tying the Knot
The sensorimotor theory of perception and consciousness is frequently presented as a variety of anti-representationalist cognitive science, and there is thus a temptation to suppose that those who take representation as bedrock should reject the approach. This paper argues that the sensorimotor approach is compatible with representationalism, and moreover that representationalism about phenomenal qualities, such as that advocated by Tye, would be…
Interpreting Qualitative Data
A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book aboutQualitative Research
David Silverman's second edition provides a refreshing introduction to doing and debating qualitative research. An antidote to the standard textbook, this new edition shows how research can be methodologically inventive, empirically rigorous, theoretically-alive and practically relevant. Using materials ranging from photographs to novels and newspaper stories, the book demonstrates that getting to grips with qualitative methods means asking ourse…
Religion
Beyond armed camps
In this response, I examine the ambiguity about the status of Membership Categorization Device Analysis (MCDA) in the work of Harvey Sacks. The ‘five guiding principles’ of MCDA that Stokoe enunciates serve as a crucial guide to future research. In what follows, I give some further examples of data analysis which, I believe, supports both her strong and weaker claims
Qualitative Research Practice
Introduction - Clive Seale et al Inside Qualitative Research PART ONE: ENCOUNTERING METHOD Interviews - Tim Rapley Oral History - Joanna Bornat Biographical Research - Gabriele Rosenthal Focus Groups - Phil Macnaghten and Greg Myers Grounded Theory - Ian Dey Performance and Rehearsal - Paul Atkinson The Ethnographer at the Opera PART TWO: ANALYTIC FRAMEWORKS Narrative Research - Molly Andrews et al Feminist Approaches - Celia Kitzinger The Foucau…
The Quest for America
Did the first truly modern society take shape in British North America between 1680 and 1770? Did ethnic and religious diversity and economic complexity combine with participatory politics to create a distinctively American society? Such questions fail to notice that these components worked at cross-purposes as often as they reinforced one another. Outlining the building blocks of ethnic or national identity without linking them to how Americans …
Marking Boundaries
Contemporary social science is acutely aware of what happens when we mark or police boundaries. Cross-cultural research highlights such issues. Face-to-face interviews and e-mail exchanges with Asian businessmen appeared to suggest clear boundaries between Tanzanian African and Asian "culture." However, such ready understanding raises two further issues. First, boundary marking might fit with a colonial methodology used by the early anthropologis…
Warriors or collaborators
Discourses of Counselling
In this book, David Silverman offers a fully researched and analytically sensitive account of how counselling, as a process, is dynamically constructed through the interaction of counsellor and client. Drawing on research on counselling of clients undergoing an HIV test, the author explores the ways in which conversations between counsellors and clients reflect, embody and subtly alter assumptions about the purpose, method and practice of counsel…
Discourses of Counselling
Interpreting Qualitative Data Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction
This a much expanded and updated version of David Silvermans best-selling introductory textbook for the beginning qualitative researcher. Features of the New Edition: • Takes account of the flood of qualitative work since the 1990s • All chapters have been substantially rewritten with the aim of greater clarity • A new chapter on Visual Images and a considerably expanded treatment of discourse analysis are provided • The number of student exercis…
Kundera's Immortality
Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantic…
The Quality of Qualitative Data
Researchers are familiar with claims that, for various reasons, many conceptions of reliability and validity are inappropriate to the analysis of qualitative data. Using transcripts drawn from doctor-patient consultations, the authors examine two methods of assessing the reliability of data and the validity of their interpretations. First, the method of intercoder agreement is used and assessed. Second, the methods of conversation analysis are ap…
Troubles Talk and Counseling Discourse
Counseling is a pervasive activity in contemporary institutional life. This article focuses on the ways in which troubles—as socially constructed realities—are talked into being in two counseling settings: a British hemophilia center that counsels individuals who have become HIV-positive through the transfusion of infected blood products and a family therapy center in the United States. Drawing upon conversation analytic studies of “troubles talk…
Competing Strategies for Analyzing the Contexts of Social Interaction
A perennial issue of sociological analysis is how to address the details of interaction without acknowledging the structurally broad or the subjectively meaningful contexts within which the details occur. The issue centers on the relation between 'how' and 'why' questions of social order. This article deals with the issue as it emerges in the methodological debate between conversation analysts and ethnomethodologically oriented ethnographers over…
Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics
Normative expectations for medical talk
Kundera's Immortality
Milan Kundera's novel Immortality bears a close relation to contemporary social science debates about the production of the self. Commentators like Kleinman and Mishler seem to have introduced a new version of authenticity based on a reinvention of the Romantic subject with the interview (as the medium) and the narrative (as the content) portrayed as the means for constructing and sharing biographical expenence. Unlike such contem porary Romantic…
Aids counselling
Although the AIDS pandemic has generated considerable social science research, the focus has almost entirely been on epidemiology and on survey research studies of health knowledge and behaviour. In contrast, this paper offers an early report on ongoing work into HIV and AIDS counselling as it occurs in practice in a number of English clinics. An analysis of transcripts of such naturally occurring encounters reveals how professionals and clients …
How was it for you? The Interview Society and the irresistible rise of the (poorly analyzed) interview
Atkinson and Silverman's (1997) depiction of the Interview Society analysed the dominance of interview studies that seek to elicit respondents 'experiences' and 'perceptions'. Their article showed that this vocabulary is deeply problematic, assuming an over-rationalistic account of behaviour and a direct link between the language of people's accounts and their past and present psychic states. In this article, using a Constructionist approach, I d…
Qualitative Methodology and Sociology
Agency and clientship in public encounters
This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co‐constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview‐based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video‐recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness…
The Politics of Field Research
Introduction - David Silverman and Jaber F Gubrium PART ONE: POLITICS OF THE FIELD Deconstructing the Field - Roy Turner The Impossible Dreams of Reformism and Romanticism - David Silverman Romantics and Stoics - Philip M Strong and Robert Dingwall The Construction of a Sociological Consumer - Peter R Grahame PART TWO: POLITICS IN THE FIELD Local Cultures and Service Policy - Jaber F Gubrium Corridors of Power - Don Slater Evaluation Research and…
Six Rules of Qualitative Research
Qualitative sociology too easily succumbs to a 'Romantic' impulse. In a sociological context, the Romantic seeks to understand raw 'experience', usually by the use of unstructured interviews. Such work can lack analytic rigour, failing to distinguish the sociologist from the journalist. Following Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, the approach adopted here emphasizes the forms of representation and contexts which inform practical reasoning. It recommend…
Troubles Talk and Counseling Discourse
Counseling is a pervasive activity in contemporary institutional life. This article focuses on the ways in which troubles—as socially constructed realities—are talked into being in two counseling settings: a British hemophilia center that counsels individuals who have become HIV-positive through the transfusion of infected blood products and a family therapy center in the United States. Drawing upon conversation analytic studies of “troubles talk…
New Directions in Sociological Theory
Reinterpreting Speech-Exchange Systems
Sociologists concerned with describing the organization of interaction have, until recently, been faced with two diverging options. Either they can focus on local cultures or on the sequential order of conversation. Ethnography's emphasis on context underpins the first option; conversation analysis' concern with a context-free structure of turn-taking provides the rationale for the second. Analysis of transcripts of AIDS Counselling suggests a mi…
The child as a social object
Marking Boundaries
Contemporary social science is acutely aware of what happens when we mark or police boundaries. Cross-cultural research highlights such issues. Face-to-face interviews and e-mail exchanges with Asian businessmen appeared to suggest clear boundaries between Tanzanian African and Asian "culture." However, such ready understanding raises two further issues. First, boundary marking might fit with a colonial methodology used by the early anthropologis…
The Quality of Qualitative Data
Researchers are familiar with claims that, for various reasons, many conceptions of reliability and validity are inappropriate to the analysis of qualitative data. Using transcripts drawn from doctor-patient consultations, the authors examine two methods of assessing the reliability of data and the validity of their interpretations. First, the method of intercoder agreement is used and assessed. Second, the methods of conversation analysis are ap…
Competing Strategies for Analyzing the Contexts of Social Interaction
A perennial issue of sociological analysis is how to address the details of interaction without acknowledging the structurally broad or the subjectively meaningful contexts within which the details occur. The issue centers on the relation between 'how' and 'why' questions of social order. This article deals with the issue as it emerges in the methodological debate between conversation analysts and ethnomethodologically oriented ethnographers over…
Interview Talk
Recent attempts to develop symbolic interactionist methodologies have sought to treat the interview as an object of sociological enquiry as well as a research instrument. But their accounts in terms of interactional rules and presentation of selves are primarily concerned with reactions to interviews, and the display of the interview setting in talk is treated as a resource rather than as a topic for investigation. Since such a reliance on the av…
Going Private
Following Strong's (1979) model of the 'ceremonial order' of the clinic, London oncology consultations drawn from the private sector and the National Health Service (NHS) are compared. Using both qualitative and quantitative measures, it is shown that private consultations offer more 'personalized' consultations than are found in the NHS. Furthermore, private patients are more inclined to orchestrate their own care and to exhibit control of terri…
Men in Mid-Career
The clinical subject
The paper examines the format and some interactional dilemmas of outpatient consultations in a clinic for cleft lip and palate. Three problems are addressed. First, the adolescent patient's status as a ‘consumer’ is problematic: it is ambiguous whether they can be entrusted with decision‐making on their own behalf. Second, there is the problematic status of parents’ rights. Third, the policy implications of these problems are raised in relation t…
The Material Word
I Introduction: the language of mastery 1. Interrupting the 'I' 2. Language and ideology in Althuser II The limits of language 3. Wittgenstein's two languages 4. Kafka: the poet of black and white III Language and thought 5. Husserl's two phenomenolgies 6. Heidegger: from letters to being, or from being to letters? IV LAnguage and society 7. The essentialism of ethnomethodology 8. Codes in conversation: the speech of Bernstein and Labdov V The pr…
The Structure of Organizations
Discourses of Counselling
The Theory of Organisations
Formal Organizations or Industrial Sociology
The emergence, in the past two decades, of a separate discipline of 'Formal Organizations' has been associated with the general acceptance of a Durkheimian view of organizations as 'natural systems' integrated by a value consensus and a de-emphasis on the processes through which they are related to the social structure. The similarities, in these respects, between Human Relations and Structural-Functionalism are suggested and an alternative Socia…
Beyond armed camps
In this response, I examine the ambiguity about the status of Membership Categorization Device Analysis (MCDA) in the work of Harvey Sacks. The ‘five guiding principles’ of MCDA that Stokoe enunciates serve as a crucial guide to future research. In what follows, I give some further examples of data analysis which, I believe, supports both her strong and weaker claims
Normative expectations for medical talk
Clerical Ideologies
Formal Organizations or Industrial Sociology
The emergence, in the past two decades, of a separate discipline of 'Formal Organizations' has been associated with the general acceptance of a Durkheimian view of organizations as 'natural systems' integrated by a value consensus and a de-emphasis on the processes through which they are related to the social structure. The similarities, in these respects, between Human Relations and Structural-Functionalism are suggested and an alternative Socia…
Organizations
Men in Mid-Career
The Theory of Organisations
The Structure of Organizations
The Theory of Organizations
The Theory of Organizations
On Phenomenology and Social Relations
Reflections on the Problem of Relevance
The Applicability of Organizational Sociology
Interview Talk
Recent attempts to develop symbolic interactionist methodologies have sought to treat the interview as an object of sociological enquiry as well as a research instrument. But their accounts in terms of interactional rules and presentation of selves are primarily concerned with reactions to interviews, and the display of the interview setting in talk is treated as a resource rather than as a topic for investigation. Since such a reliance on the av…
Sociology of Meaning
Speaking seriously
Speaking seriously
New Directions in Sociological Theory
Problems of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological Inquiry
Organizations as Bargaining and Influence Systems
The Scientific Reception of Castaneda
Official Discourse
The Material Word
I Introduction: the language of mastery 1. Interrupting the 'I' 2. Language and ideology in Althuser II The limits of language 3. Wittgenstein's two languages 4. Kafka: the poet of black and white III Language and thought 5. Husserl's two phenomenolgies 6. Heidegger: from letters to being, or from being to letters? IV LAnguage and society 7. The essentialism of ethnomethodology 8. Codes in conversation: the speech of Bernstein and Labdov V The pr…
Language as Ideology
The Material Word
Medical Work
The child as a social object
Sociology (50 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Social science (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works)