Breaking down the question
The question asks you to evaluate ethnomethodology against two specific methodological criteria — reliability and validity. It is not enough to describe what ethnomethodology is; you must judge its capacity to yield dependable, accurate data and “justify” that judgement with reasons.
The examiner is probing whether you understand the two criteria — reliability as consistency and replicability, validity as capturing what one intends to study — and whether you can apply them to an interpretive tradition that deliberately rejects positivist assumptions.
At 10 marks, the sharpest answers take a clear position: ethnomethodology scores strongly on validity, being close to lived meaning, but weakly on conventional reliability, since its findings resist replication and generalisation.
How to approach it
Begin by outlining ethnomethodology as Harold Garfinkel's study of the everyday methods by which ordinary people make sense of and produce social order. Explain its tools — conversation analysis, breaching experiments — and its concepts of indexicality and reflexivity.
Then assess it against each criterion in turn. On validity, argue that its close attention to members' own meaning-making gives it high ecological validity. On reliability, note that its context-bound, micro observations are hard to replicate and standardise. Readers can explore this further in our notes on non-positivist methodologies.
Conclude with a qualified verdict rather than a flat yes or no.
Model answer
Ethnomethodology, founded by Harold Garfinkel, studies the taken-for-granted methods and common-sense reasoning through which ordinary members of society produce and sustain a sense of social order. Rather than imposing the sociologist's categories, it examines how people themselves accomplish orderly interaction, using devices such as conversation analysis and “breaching experiments” that disrupt everyday routines to reveal the tacit rules underlying them. Its key ideas are indexicality — the meaning of an utterance depends on its context — and reflexivity — accounts of a situation help constitute that situation.
Judged by validity, ethnomethodology has real strengths. Because it observes interaction in its natural setting and privileges the meanings participants themselves use, it captures social reality as actually experienced rather than as pre-defined by the researcher. This gives it high ecological and interpretive validity: it studies what people are really doing when they make sense of their world, avoiding the distortion that can arise when rigid, imposed categories are forced onto fluid social life. For grasping the fine texture of everyday meaning, it can be more valid than survey methods that assume the researcher already knows the relevant variables.
Judged by reliability, however, it fares poorly against conventional standards. Reliability requires that findings be consistent and replicable, so that another researcher applying the same procedure would obtain comparable results. Ethnomethodological studies are intensely context-bound, small-scale and dependent on the interpretive skill of the observer, which makes replication and standardisation difficult. Because meaning is treated as indexical and locally produced, the same “method” cannot be expected to generate stable, generalisable results across settings. Critics also charge that breaching experiments and micro-analyses are impressionistic and cannot be checked in the way positivists demand.
Therefore, whether ethnomethodology yields reliable and valid data depends on which criterion and whose standards we apply. On its own interpretive terms, it produces valid, richly contextual insight into how social order is achieved. On the positivist criteria of reliability and replicability, it is weak, and it makes little claim to representative generalisation. My considered view is that ethnomethodology offers highly valid but not conventionally reliable data, and is best treated as a valuable complement to, rather than a replacement for, more standardised methods.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner wants a genuine evaluation organised around the two named criteria, not a general essay on ethnomethodology. A common weakness is to describe Garfinkel's approach at length and then assert, without argument, that it is either good or bad.
Higher marks go to answers that define reliability and validity separately and weigh ethnomethodology against each, conceding its interpretive validity while acknowledging its problems with replication and generalisation. A confident, qualified conclusion — strong on validity, weak on reliability — demonstrates the methodological discernment the question is designed to reward.