Humans are an inquisitive social species. We habitually survey the world around us, looking at our fellow human beings, wondering what makes them do what they do. Think of a close friend at university who unexpectedly drops her course work to dash on a trip around the world. Or consider an older colleague in a seemingly stable marriage who begins an affair with a much younger man. In addition to asking questions of a personal nature, we ask questions of a social nature, pertaining to situations with which we are confronted and societies in which we live our lives. How come that ever more yuppies seem to move into my neighbourhood? How will the newcomers and we, the established, manage to live together? How does our society change and evolve?

Asking these questions is part of everyday life but it is also at the heart of social research. This book is concerned with one particular – and we will argue: a very productive – way that social researchers study the world, called ‘naturalistic inquiry’. An initial definition of naturalistic inquiry is: studying people in everyday circumstances by ordinary means. This includes observing how people go about their daily business and how they interact, listening to what they have to tell, considering what they accomplish and produce, understanding what their stories, interactions and accomplishments mean, and reporting back to them. Inquiring naturalistically by ordinary means in social research is like playing on authentic instruments according to original practices in classical music or like using biological ingredients according to local recipes in cooking. It is an effort to get back to what has been lost through mechanization, standardization, digitalization, and other forces of modernization. ‘Social research’ nowadays too often consists of conducting surveys via the Internet, transforming answers of so-called respondents into ‘data’, applying advanced statistical techniques to those data, and reporting the outcomes in specialist journals that few ordinary people can read. Naturalistic inquiry aims to bridge the gulf that has emerged between social scientists on the one hand and the rest of humanity on the other hand.