Everyday Life

Everyday life experiences refer to the ritualistic, ordinary, and often mundane occurrences that take place on any given day in a researcher or participant's life. Everyday life as a methodology examines and uncovers the realizations of daily life and how they are communicated and interpreted by an observer and/or a participant. Everyday life combines several disciplines and perspectives, including symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and existential sociology.

Everyday life as a participatory action research method is not isolated; rather, it is embedded in people and situations. Researchers often negotiate between research that is collected traditionally through means of data collection and creative and introspective research that relies on the positionality, perspective, and viewpoint of participants.

Everyday life research focuses on the details and seemingly insignificant occurrences that collectively contribute to how a situation, phenomenon, or occurrence is interpreted and experienced. Such research seeks to understand social experience based on how people do and experience social life, which privileges experience as knowledge. The perspective becomes a study of social interaction in a natural environment that acknowledges extraordinary happenings while legitimating the ordinary events of life. By privileging people in their natural state and interacting with them in their natural context, research takes on a realistic reflection of life rather than an oversimplified and generalized version.

Exploring everyday life requires the researcher to focus on details, make connections and associations between emergent and repetitive themes, focus equally on sameness and difference (what happened today that did not happen yesterday and how that influences the research topic or focus), and make comparisons between the researcher's experience and the topic being studied. This position allows the researcher to become a character or presence in the story he or she is telling and to deduce a theory or analysis based on the information that is uncovered.

Everyday life is often written in a first- or third-person voice and relies on rich descriptions, sharp detail, creativity, and comparative analysis. Everyday life sociology is a research style that emerged in California during the late 1980s and focused on the philosophical work of interactionism, ethnomethodology, phenomenology, rule response, and ritual engagement. Everyday life research is collected through interviews, participant observation, introspective journal writing, and other qualitative methods.

This approach is useful in analyzing qualitative data because it requires the researcher to consider and [Page 307]negotiate the ubiquitous themes that occur in everyday life, from work to play. Important details can be discovered through the monotonous recovery of daily occurrences that differentiates individual experiences. By focusing on specific and overlooked details, everyday life has the potential to generate new knowledge and concepts from seemingly marginal and unimportant daily occurrences.

One of the benefits of everyday life as a research approach is the encouragement of diversity. It is widely used among marginalized groups to privilege their personal perspectives and viewpoints that might otherwise be silenced or misinterpreted.