Why do people expect the truth from case records?

Garfinkel's obituary: I often find obituaries one of the most attractive parts of newspapers, because, with the odd exception when the Guardian prints a critical obit on someone every right-thinking leftie hates, they are usually positive, and they look at the whole of someone's life and achievements, rather than just the currently newsworthy snippet of their lives.



I have often cited with pleasure Garfinkel's paper on clinic records, in which he points out that health and social care professionals are bound to write records which show them in a good light, because they know what really went on, when they read the note, so it reminds them of what they need to know, but anyone else who reads it is likely to want to criticise them, so they will always present the best of what they did. It's so obvious, and we all know this, so why do people expect the truth from case records?

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Harold Garfinkel, who has died aged 93, was professor emeritus in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was based from 1954 until his retirement in 1987. In the 1950s, he coined the term "ethnomethodology", literally meaning "people's methodology".

Ethnomethodologists showed how the formal methods and procedures that take place in courtrooms, scientific laboratories and workplaces are underpinned by everyday understandings, argumentative practices and embodied skills. Garfinkel challenged the idea that sociological methods were grounded in a specialised scientific rationality that was independent of the irrational and subjective basis of ordinary social conduct.

Garfinkel sought to probe the presumptive existence of social order with a series of idiosyncratic investigations that disrupted commonplace routines in households and public places. Even apparently mild disruptions, such as acting the part of a polite stranger at one's own family's dinner table, provoked explosive reactions laden with indignation. This demonstrated the moral accountability infused within even the most mundane of routines. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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