Abductive Analysis

Tavory, Iddo; Timmermans, Stefan

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226180458.001.0001

Cited by 1,003 publications

(307 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

295

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Our identification of these analytic lenses and the way in which we relate them to one another is a distillation of our own scholarship and teaching of how to read, perform, and write ethnography. We believe that the result augments the traditional emphasis on theory construction (e.g., Burawoy 1998;Glaser and Strauss 1967;Tavory and Timmermans 2014) while providing a novel heuristic for understanding the various ways that ethnographers explain situated social action. We begin with the traditional emphasis on ideal typical theory construction before making the case for shifting our focus away from questions of induction/ deduction and toward the analytic approaches ethnographers take in practice.…”

Section: The First Set Of Lenses Deals With the Level Of Explanationmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…After all, many ethnographers do not locate their own work within this rigid typology, and even those who rhetorically position their analysis as inductive or deductive routinely tack recursively between data and theory in practice (Tavory and Timmermans [2014] refer to this theorydata dialogue as "abductive analysis," which they see as a third way).…”

Section: The Analytic Lenses Of Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography

Jerolmack

Khan

2017

Socius

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Original ArticleThis article explores the analytic choices that drive the selection of units of observation and units of analysis in ethnography. These analytic choices have been underspecified in most of the literature and in most scholars' training. While debates rage about the proper relationship between theory and data (i.e., induction, deduction, or abduction) and while students are instructed on practicalities like picking a site, getting access, and writing up field notes, there is often little guidance on what counts as observable units or what the implications are of viewing the field through different analytical traditions (e.g., an interactionist or a dispositional approach).Once someone enters the field, there is simply too much data, too many potential directions the research can take; the most punctilious ethnographer studying the most bounded field site cannot record and analyze everything. To make fieldwork manageable in a way that is methodologically defensible (i.e., not arbitrary), the ethnographer must choose what aspect of social life will be privileged in data collection and analysis-for example, the micro-foundations of interaction, the logic or dynamics of organizations, or the workings of macro forces like power. That is, he or she must select what we call an analytic lens, a particular style of doing ethnography.In this article, we outline eight analytic lenses that we believe typify ethnography, organizing them into three groups that highlight the affinities and contrasts among them. The first set of lenses deals with the level of explanation:Researchers can use ethnography to make claims about phenomena at the micro-, meso-/organizational, or macro-level. The second group focuses on the subject of explanation: Researchers can choose to focus their explanations on particular people and the places within which they organize their lives, or researchers can make abstract social mechanisms the "protagonist" of their ethnographies. The final group is the location of explanation: Researchers can explain situated action as resulting from actors' durable dispositions, or they can prioritize the situational determinants of action. Implicit within the idea of an analytic lens is that researchers have a point of view. Therefore, we conclude by discussing reflexivity and the positioning of the researcher behind the lenses selected. We categorize reflexivity as an analytic lens in order to go beyond the view of embeddedness in the field as "contamination" or as a source of bias. Instead, we suggest how reflexive ethnographers can use the novel situations creat...

show abstract

Section: The First Set Of Lenses Deals With the Level Of Explanationmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: The Analytic Lenses Of Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography

Jerolmack

Khan

2017

Socius

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…I had expected to find gun board administrators persistently curtailing the ability of civilians to carry firearms, but my empirical observations did not reflect this expectation. Thus, my coding took a theory abduction approach (Tavory & Timmermans ) that emphasized unexpected empirical patterns. Turning to studies documenting the proliferation of criminal justice practices as a generalized mechanism of social control (Simon ), on the one hand, and the persistence and proliferation of administrative forms of penality (Beckett & Murakawa ; Garland ; Velloso ; Zedner ) on the other, I iteratively analyzed points of similarity between the administrative procedures I observed and existing scholarship.…”

Section: Methods and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hidden Arm of the Law: Examining Administrative Justice in Gun Carry Licensing

Carlson¹

2017

Law Soc Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Responding to calls to “decenter” American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve‐turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other.

show abstract

“…While the main approach of the study is inductive, certain theoretical frameworks guided the research so that approach of the study in general can be described as combining inductive, deductive and abductive approach where data driven observations and theory driven conceptualizations interact (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Because the nature of this study was exploratory, that is, no earlier studies on the forest sector competence modelling was identified; it was necessary to gain a preliminary picture of the current situation through in-depth expert interviews.…”

Section: Collection Of the Data And Analytic Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling competences and anticipating the future competence needs in the forest sector

Rekola¹,

Nippala²,

Tynjälä³

et al. 2018

Silva Fenn.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Modelling competences and anticipating the future competence needs in the forest sector Rekola M., Nippala J., Tynjälä P., Virtanen A. (2018). Modelling competences and anticipating the future competence needs in the forest sector. Silva Fennica vol. 52 no. 3 article id 9983. 19 p. https://doi.org/10.14214/sf.9983 Highlights• The most frequently used practices of modelling competences in Finnish forest sector organisations were superior-subordinate review discussions and quantitative surveys.• Competence modelling was used for several human resources functions but surprisingly not for hiring and compensation.• The experts interviewed underlined the need for generic competences in the future, especially they highlighted the importance of information processing and personal self-management skills. AbstractThis explorative study examined practices of competence modelling in the forest sector organisations and how organisations anticipate changes in competence needs in the future. Semi-structured in-depth interviews (n = 10) were conducted amongst forest sector experts in Finland and data was analysed by thematic analysis. The findings showed that the practices of modelling competences were diverse, most frequently used ones being superior-subordinate review discussions and quantitative competence surveys. In addition to these formal systems, informal modelling, especially on the team level and in smaller companies was also frequent. Organisations used competence modelling for several human resources functions, such as appraisal, motivation and promotion of employees. Surprisingly hiring and compensation functions were not mentioned. Perceptions related to competence modelling were generally speaking positive. The most important challenges were the lack of further actions and sometimes the extraordinary burden to the employees. When anticipating the future, the experts interviewed mentioned several commonly recognised trends, e.g., development of information technology, fragmentation of working life and structural changes in labour markets. All these require more generic competences related to information processing and personal self-management, especially respondents highlighted the importance of self-awareness skills. It is concluded that several useful practices for competence modelling already exist and that present study provides a basis for further quantitative further study.

show abstract

Abductive Analysis

Cited by 1,003 publications

References 0 publications

The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography

The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography

The Hidden Arm of the Law: Examining Administrative Justice in Gun Carry Licensing

Modelling competences and anticipating the future competence needs in the forest sector

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About