This book began by defining naturalistic inquiry as the study of people in everyday circumstances by ordinary means. Drawing on the tradition of philosophical pragmatism, which looks at societies as webs of interaction and meaning, we proposed a model of naturalistic inquiry that follows an arc: the arc of naturalistic inquiry, consisting of a series of consecutive hermeneutic steps (see Figure 13). Naturalistic inquiry begins down the arc with a loose collection of ideas, often a combination of ideas from scientific literature and common sense acquired in the course of your own life. These ideas coagulate into a foreshadowed problem that you wish to explore in a field study. During the field study, you draw on a broad register of data collection techniques (observations, interviews, and so on) and armed with them you begin to collect empirical material. Initially, your descriptions of the material are relatively thin and resemble a travelogue. As your material becomes saturated – when gathering more material does not yield additional insights – you gradually move into an inductive analysis of it; the descriptions become thicker, more verstehende or understanding. You then begin to theorize your verstehende interpretations of a society by distilling and abstracting explanatory ideas about them from your empirical data. Eventually, you become capable of telling about this society in both indigenous (emic) and social-scientific (etic) terms. You can describe, understand, and explain in a coherent fashion what goes on in that society, and you are able to convey all of this to outsiders. You have arrived at the end of the arc. Hopefully, the experience will inspire you to begin yet another naturalistic inquiry.

Or will it? Is naturalistic inquiry really up to the task? Does its focus on everyday life experience not reflect some long-lost romantic ideal that has inevitably (and some would say: fortunately) been replaced by more modern – read: better – research practices that deal with real, hard facts?