Empirical Methods

Definition

Empirical methods in everyday-life studies refer to grounded, observational approaches that prioritize direct documentation of lived experience over philosophical or cultural-theory abstraction. Maycroft (2007) argues that "the politics of everyday life are just as fruitfully approached through empirical study as they are via philosophical or cultural contemplation," warning against "theories in search of validating details" that select evidence to support pre-existing theoretical models.

Key Thinkers

• Neil Maycroft — advocates empirical corrective to philosophical/cultural-theory dominance in everyday-life studies.
• Roderick J. Lawrence — the domestic-space exemplar: "a historiographic and ethnographic method of inquiry to examine social variables relative to ordering domestic space" (editors' headnote, p. 184); his own methodological chapter "A More Humane History of Homes: Research Method and Application" (1985); and the call for comparative studies — "a scarcity of research that identifies those objects which are more highly valued than others, by different groups of people in the same location, at the same or different times" (p. 185).
• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: Jane Callaghan & Catherine Palmer, the industrial engineers whose 1944 chore studies practice the design-side version of the empirical corrective — measurement of the body in action before programmatic assumption.)

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life
• Theories of the Everyday
• Time-Geography
• Space-Shape — the empirical method's design-register instrument: "the distinction between them is what separates programming spaces through diagrams versus empirically documenting the body in action."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Everyday life in the real world (Maycroft 2007)
• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — empirical method inside design practice: Weinthal distinguishes the designer's programmatic categorization of domestic movements ("bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting") from their "context of anthropometric studies" — "the distinction between them is what separates programming spaces through diagrams versus empirically documenting the body in action." Callaghan & Palmer's 1944 studies are the case: industrial engineers who "sought to capture the moving body and frame it within categories of tasks, but their intention was first to see how the body moved in time and space before making assumptions about the programmed interior" — 35mm cameras, mirrors, simultaneous views, and "dark technique" light tracings producing "true data" for "ergonomically improved domestic interiors." Maycroft's corrective (data before theory) here becomes a design methodology: document the movement, then program the space. See space-shape, light-tracing, domestic-interior.
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the domestic-space exemplar: the historiographic-ethnographic method ("a historiographic and ethnographic method of inquiry to examine social variables relative to ordering domestic space, with particular emphasis on rooms for eating and preparing food in Australian and English households," editors, p. 184); the literature-grounded confirmation that manifest functions alone don't explain domestic consumption (a named research corpus: Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Douglas and Isherwood, Furby, Kron, Laumann and House, Pratt, Weisner and Weibel, p. 184); and the gap statement as research agenda — comparative studies "of the cultural, social and psychological definitions of domestic objects and processes are overdue, because there is still a scarcity of research that identifies those objects which are more highly valued than others, by different groups of people in the same location, at the same or different times" (p. 185). Where Maycroft's empiricism corrects theory from single cases, Lawrence's corrects it with a comparative program: same location, different groups; same groups, different times. See manifest-and-latent-functions, domestic-interior.

Open Questions

• What would a rigorous empirical methodology for everyday-life studies look like that avoids both "catalogues of minor irritations" and "theories in search of validating details"?
• How does empirical observation relate to theoretical frameworks — should theory emerge from data, or should data be interpreted through theory?
• What is the relationship between empirical methods and the sociological tradition (Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, Bourdieu's habitus)?