Membership Categorization Device Analysis (MCDA)

Membership categorization device analysis (MCDA) is a qualitative methodology that aims to describe the processes involved in the way members of society invoke and use categories to organize and understand the social world. MCDA was developed by Harvey Sacks alongside his work on conversation analysis. MCDA is part of the ethnomethodological tradition where the data are treated as the topic of analysis. Attention is paid to describing the underlying structures and procedures employed to accomplish the activities under study.

Membership categorization is a fundamental part of social activity and as such is also a moral activity. It is used to attribute social identities and attain social order. Investigating members' use of categories and devices in any setting (e.g., news story, everyday conversation, interview account) is a means of showing how identities, social relationships, and institutional phenomena are produced.

If one wants to describe members' activities and the way one produces and organizes them, one needs to establish how he or she chooses among the available category sets for grasping some event. MCDA does this by constructing the machinery that would produce the actual occurrences that are part of social life. Take as an example a simple sentence, “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.” This sentence is the focus of a seminal paper by Sacks in which he describes the basis of MCDA. One can begin to examine what it means and, importantly, the rules that underpin this understanding. The mother picking up the baby is heard to be the mother of the child. The mother and child are recognized as a pair of related categories. This meaning is evident as it is a standard type of pairing. The fact that the mother picks up the crying baby also infers that this activity is bound to her role as a mother. It is the responsibility of a mother of a child to attend to the child if he or she is crying. This inference exemplifies the way in which one attends in daily life to members' methods for producing a world that one recognizes as orderly and moral or as rule-governed.

When people do description, they use categories from a collection; for example, family (mother, father, children). This process is called a membership categorization device (MCD). A collection will contain at least one category that may be applied to a population containing at least one member. Using rules of application, the collection of membership categories provides for the pairing of at least one population member and one categorization device member. An MCD is then a collection plus rules of application. Sets of categories are inference rich in that they store a great deal of the knowledge that members have about their society. Members generate and use categories in their descriptions, such as in interview accounts or newspaper stories. Description is done through the selection of particular categories and the setting up of particular rules (social norms) regarding their use.

Categories can be related to each other; for example, as pairs that may be contained in a collection containing laypeople. This collection will contain a set of rights and responsibilities concerning the activity of giving help (between laypersons). Another collection of categories may be set up composed of laypeople and professionals. These will be set up as two separate classes. The professional class is constructed by reference to special distributions of knowledge existing about how to deal with some trouble. An example of a professional class would be medical doctors. Accordingly, they have special rights for dealing with some trouble; for example, illness. In such a context, all those who are not professionals are laypeople. So, for example, analysis of patient interview accounts about the experience of health care may reveal how laypeople construct the respective roles and responsibilities of patients and doctors.

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