TALKING OUR WAY TO MEANINGFUL EXPLANATIONS 133ways of organizing their program experiences and drawing lessons from them, their notions of
what makes it acceptable to claim welfare benefits, their ways of classifying their fellow welfare
participants, their images of what government is and does, and so on. As I elaborate below, such
understandings were basic to my analytic approach. They were the background premises for
clients’ choices and actions; they contained the logics that made a host of obscure, seemingly
unrelated narratives explicable.
To pursue such understandings, I placed a high priority on encountering clients’ conceptions on
terms they found plausible and in a language they found familiar. As Jennifer Hochschild (1981, 21)
notes, such priorities direct a researcher toward methods that invite “textured, idiosyncratic responses.
The researcher must permit—even induce—people to speak for themselves and must be wary of
channeling their thought through his or her own preconceptions about what questions to ask, how
answers should be shaped, and what coding categories best subdivide the responses.” This descrip-
tion captures important aspects of my approach. But here, it is important to emphasize two points.
First, making it a priority to encounter participants’ understandings on their own terms is not
the same as accepting participants’ descriptions of their understandings. Interviewees can easily
misrepresent or misperceive their own conceptions of the world. Likewise, I found that although
some aspects of clients’ conceptions were consciously held and easily articulated, others were so
natural to participants (so much the water in which they swam) that they could hardly be per-
ceived, let alone expressed. They were buried in what Schütz (1967, 74) calls the “taken for
granted” of everyday life. To get at them required interrogating the gaps and silences in clients’
accounts, the inconsistencies between narratives and declarations, and the unstated major pre-
mises of an assortment of incomplete syllogisms (H. Becker 1998, 147–49). Second, prioritizing
exposure to language that is meaningful to insiders is not the same as privileging insiders’ con-
cepts over social scientific concepts. Rather, it involves carefully distinguishing the roles of each
within our analyses. As Clifford Geertz (1973b) emphasizes, in an interpretive project, we seek to
assemble thick descriptions of participants’ conceptual worlds so that we can compel them to
speak to the social scientific concepts we care about most.^8
Third and finally, I treated construction of a coherent account of participants’ understandings
as a prerequisite for adequate explanation and sought to ascertain the sources and consequences
of such understandings. All social scientists build explanation out of a dialogue of theory and
evidence. But our demands of the evidence—the types of empirical accounts we deem necessary
for explanation—vary across projects. In some instances, I deem it adequate to show that relevant
variables covary in a theoretically telling manner. For example, I might conclude that differences
in state welfare policies can be “explained” by differences in the racial composition of welfare
recipients without demanding any direct evidence of lawmakers’ intentions (Soss et al. 2001).
My approach to explanation in Unwanted Claims placed a higher priority on people’s conceptual
worlds. Throughout the study, I asked why reasonable people found it sensible to choose and act
as my interviewees did. I sought out clients’ reasons for considering this action more appropriate
than that one, for feeling as they did about an institution, for drawing particular conclusions from
particular experiences. Charles Taylor captures the basic outline of such an effort to construct the
rudiments of interpretive explanation:
We make sense of action when there is a coherence between the actions of the agent and the
meaning of his situation for him. We find his action puzzling until we find such a coher-
ence.... This coherence in no way implies that the action is rational: the meaning of a
situation for an agent may be full of confusion and contradiction, but the adequate depic-
tion of this contradiction makes sense of it. (1979, 35)