Des réflexions sur quelques controverses à propos de l’analyse qualitative  en sociologie

Qualitative analysis in sociology has been generating epistemological debates as regards its objectivity, the reliability and representativeness of its data, as concerns the observers’ part in their observation or the understanding-interpreting they are to achieve; the rise towards generalisation, objectivity and neutrality has led to answers putting forward the level of fineness or the “social construct of reality”. Our discussion deliberately moves away from this as yet insolvable debate. Our focus is rather on social ontologies: the one set de facto by social agents based on a social semantic of action which, though it is shared, is nevertheless local; and the virtual one of a sociological object the nature of which is to be relational along at least three dimensions: the relation between social agents and the socio historical and socio cultural processes social agents project and articulate within any observable situation; the relation between the situation, the perception the agents have of it and the multiple horizons of expectation they may invest into them; the relation between the situation, its participants and the interpretative position of the researcher who, necessarily, during his/her observation remains a participant among others with his/her own history, the processes they project into the observation situation and their analytical specificity, a relation which is materialised by their field logs or their initial understanding through archive documents or interviews conducted among social agents. Thus, social ontologies open up to the necessity of a methodological theory of observation since the researcher’s constructs are dependent on the common semantics of practice and action he/she largely shares with the social agents. Thus, the rational approach requires that those observations come under a sociology of knowledge forms with which the agents as well as the researcher actualize and “realize” social phenomena