PART I: POSITIVELY UNDERTAKEN

close ethnographic observation of the settings in which, and occa-

sions on which, the actual decisions involving the statistical data are
made. Only then is it possible to see just how the data are “meas-
ured,” how their significance is assigned, in relation to the other
practical considerations that inform the decisions in question. That
surely includes how their factual status is assessed, not as a matter
of professional sociological methodology aimed at establishing the
data’s reliability and validity for scientific/theoretical purposes, but
as a matter of the practical methodology of organizational person-
nel charged with getting things done. To say that their meaning is
found in the practical, organizational uses to which they are put is
not to signal the shortcomings of the official statistics, but, on the
contrary, to locate them in the world in which they belong and have
their being. Although not concerned with official crime statistics, the
study by Mair et al. (2016) of some aspects of the work of members
of a statistical unit at a British university exemplifies what we have
in mind.
Garfinkel makes the essential point at several places in his Studies
in Ethnomethodology (1967). As you read this summary of his work
on this matter, imagine it is not about staff in a psychiatric clinic
recording applicant or patient contacts, but is about police officers
writing up their notes, or filling out the occurrence reports follow-
ing some incident, or coding the occurrence reports in terms of the
reporting categories required by the CCJS; and then tie that to the
uses to which the compiled statistics are put in the halls of govern-
ment as generally described above. When examining the records of
a psychiatric outpatient clinic for the purposes of a research study to
determine the criteria by which applicants were selected for treat-
ment, Garfinkel (1967: chapter 6, in collaboration with Egon Bittner)
reports that “there were few items in our schedule for which we
obtained answers.” For example,

race, occupation, religion, and education [were obtained] in

about a third of the cases . . . Of 47 items that dealt with the his-
tory of contacts between applicants and clinic personnel we had
returns on 18 items for 90 per cent of our cases; for 20 other items
we got information from between 30 per cent to none of the
cases.
(Garfinkel 1967: 187)

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