STRATEGY

This work has been based on a field study of a fairly intensive kind, a detailed study of a small population in a limited geographical area. The reason for this kind of research was the wish to produce a sociological enquiry which explored the meanings of religion and social and economic relations for the society. For this I needed interactional and highly situational data.

A price has to be paid for the adoption of this strategy. The life of mining villages is not orientated to the production of data for sociologists. Thus the data actually collected may raise issues that are not dealt with in any other literature and it is not possible therefore to gain a ready perspective on their relevance – especially if the issues are not central to this research. For example, the Irish clearly played an important role in the villages, but there is no study of the Irish in County Durham to which the data can be referred. Conversely data that are central to our main themes may not be forthcoming; the obvious example in this case was the lack of hard data on relations at the place of work.

A more eclectic approach would provide a composite sociological picture by taking a sermon from one village, an action from another, the social composition of a chapel in a third village and so on. All these could be brought together to construct a coherent model.