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Studying Equality/Inequality: Naturalist and Constructionist Approaches to Equality in Marriage

This article compares naturalist and constructionist approaches to the qualitative study of equality and inequality, and encourages more ethnographers to adopt the latter. Focusing on the subfield of marital equality, three areas of divergence are explored: sampling, interviewing, and the analysis and presentation of data. In each area, naturalists tend to obscure the diversity and complexity of respondents’ interpretations. The constructionist alternative is to make storytelling paramount by treating equality and inequality as situated narrative accomplishments. A constructionist approach focuses on respondents’ own ethnographic skills while still fitting “the data” into a larger analytic story about equality.