Objective Measures and Subjective Reports

Abstract

The paper discusses how visual research methods that draw on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can help sociologists to reveal how optometrists' assess the clarity of their clients' distance vision. It argues that the detailed analysis of video-recorded interactions in optometric consultation rooms can help reveal the practical organization of the 'routine' work through which optometrists examine and assess their clients' sight. Save for the contribution of the paper to methodological discussions about the use of visual data for the analysis of the practical work of optometrists, the paper also demonstrates how video-based research can add to recent debates in organizational sociology, workplace studies, and practice theory as well as to discussions about service quality and quality of care in health-service settings.

Sensoriality, Social Interaction, and “Doing sensing” in Physical–Cultural Ethnographies

“…Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers are amongst those social scientists emphasizing how sensory experience is shaped via socio-cultural frameworks, but vision has only rarely been analyzed as a sociological phenomenon, produced in social interaction (Simmel 1970;Sudnow 1972;Weinstein and Weinstein 1984). Ethnomethodologists, in contrast, have developed a small, but rich corpus of work that examines seeing as intricate, complex, and interactionally achieved (e.g., Corsby and Jones 2020;Sharrock and Coulter 1998;vom Lehn et al 2017). Thus, "doing seeing" and the development of a distinctive "vis-ability" (Schindler 2018) as a skilled way of seeing, relevant to the specific task at hand, are achieved in very different ways by different social groups.…”