Understanding society a little bit at a time

WATERLOO, Ont. -- Prof. Robert Prus, ethnographer and University of Waterloo sociologist, has a somewhat unusual way of pursuing his profession.

Unlike many sociologists, he chooses not to send out questionnaires to large numbers of people and then run the data through a computer to correlate the findings in a variety of ways in an attempt to come up with new insights into sociological questions.

Instead, as a "symbolic interactionist," he relies on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with the people whose "life-worlds" he is studying. As members of particular groups or subcultures in society, these people might be merchants, athletes, school teachers, doctors, gang members, among others.

He tries to use these interviews and other contact occasions to learn how people see their situations -- what they define as problems and other interests, and what strategies they invoke and the adjustments they make along the way.

Always, he is looking for information that he can later apply to the members of other groups; he starts out with specific life-worlds and talks to individuals and groups but he looks for interactional themes that may have universal applicability.

Prus, whose research is "ethnographic," has been working along these lines for years and has produced books on marketing and sales, on card and dice hustlers, on magicians, and on a variety of other subcultures included in the "hotel community." Currently, he is doing research on consumer behavior and economic development, pursuing these studies from an interactionist perspective as well.

"At the present time, in the social sciences, there is great emphasis on finding the factors that affect peoples' behavior, things causing them to act in certain ways," he says. "Little attention is given to what people actually do out there. I approach people, asking them to tell me about their lives as they see them, and how they deal with that."

The research is not intended to help those he studies solve any problems, or become either more or less productive, or more or less "deviant" in the conduct of their lives. His focus is on the ways people make sense of their world, what they are doing and how they manage their activities.

More traditional social scientists tend not to deal with group life this way, and consequentially, in Prus's view, fail to understand how people engage the world about them.

"Whether they are driving cars, baking bread, playing sports, solving mathematical problems or running retail stores, you want people to tell you, to explain in great detail, exactly what they are doing, how they do things, and how this corresponds to their views of reality," he says. "If you want to understand the human condition, you have to look into every nook and cranny of human involvement, including politics, religion, deviance, medicine, family life . . . and so on."

Again, he seeks a "generic" appreciation for what people tell him about their life-worlds and how they manage things therein. He looks for common threads running through the activities of various groups of people, be they scientists, the police, artists, realtors, farmers, taxi drivers, or friends and family members.

He believes that learning how the members of one group manage their activities can tell him things about the members of other groups as well. For instance, finding out how the members of a political party go about persuading others to join them may better enable researchers to understand how store proprietors might attract customers, or deal with their competitors, or how the clergy seek and maintain their congregations.

Ethnographic research is highly labor intensive as Prus practises it. It involves the expenditure of a great deal of time to investigate particular realms of activity in extended detail.

At the basis of Prus's view of the social sciences lies the assumption that all societies consist of a multiplicity of subcultures. These are not characteristics exclusive to an "advanced" 20th century society, because so-called "primitive" societies must also be extremely sophisticated in order to survive. They too have to deal with the practical problems associated with geography, transportation, clothing, warmth, food, health care, the raising of children, and so forth.

Adopting an "interactionist" position, he is concerned with the ways people actively engage the world about them or accomplish community life "in the making," rather than making any judgments about either their moralities or the morality of their practices.

"My task is to understand the contexts in which people do what they do," he says. "It is to try to understand people's activities within the frameworks that they develop and use. This is why we don't prescribe or give advice. We study and analyse the human condition as thoroughly, carefully, and extensively as possible, and this in itself is quite a challenge."

Prus contends that his techniques could be applied to the study of any group in any society including, for instance, children playing on a school yard, people working in a hospital setting, or a study of family relationships. He says the same techniques that can be used to study people living in an advanced urban society can also be applied to the study of a so-called primitive one.

Recently, he has articulated his position in a new book, Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities, published by State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y. It is intended for an academic audience and Prus sees it as providing a research agenda not just for sociologists and anthropologists, but for the social scientists more generally.

Contact: Prof. Robert Prus, (519) 888-4567, ext. 2105

Written by Bob Whitton for the UW News Bureau, (519) 888-4444

Release no. 113 -- July 15, 1997