Situational Analysis

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Situational analysis goes beyond the conventional qualitative methods assertion that “context matters” in considering a case. In contrast, situational analysis asserts that there is no such thing as “context” instead, the conditions of the situation are in the situation. Hence, the conditional elements of the situation need to be specified in the analysis of the situation itself because they are constitutive of it, not merely surrounding it or framing it or contributing to it. They are it. The situation itself is the key unit of analysis. Cases cannot be abstracted from situations. Cases are situations.

The elements of the situation to be taken into account are laid out in Figure 1. The fundamental assumption is that everything in the situation both constitutes and affects almost everything else in the situation in some way and are conditions of the possibilities of meaning-making and action. People and things, humans and nonhumans, fields of practice, discourses, disciplinary and other formations, visual images and symbols, controversies, organizations, and institutions can all be present and mutually consequential. The empirical question is “How do these conditions appear—make themselves felt as consequential—in the situation?” As a part of doing systematic grounded analysis, situational maps offer new relational ways to specify empirically.

Situational analysis is accomplished through mapping and memoing. First, the situational map lays out the major human, nonhuman, visual, discursive, and other elements in the research situation of interest and provokes analyses of relations among them. This map is intended to capture the messy complexities of the situation in their dense relations and permutations. Situational maps intentionally work against the usual simplifications so characteristic of scientific work in particularly postmodern ways.

Second, social worlds/arenas maps lay out the collective actors and their arenas of commitment where they engage in ongoing negotiations. They offer mesolevel interpretations of the situation, engaging its social organizational and institutional dimensions. These maps are also postmodern in their assumptions: We cannot assume direction-alities of influence; boundaries are open and porous; negotiations are fluid and ongoing. The empirical questions are “Who cares about what, and what do they want to do about it?” Negotiations of many kinds, from coercion to bargaining, are the basic social processes. Things could always be otherwise.

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