The Discourses of Mediation and the Power of Naming

Abstract

their homes. Both plaintiffs and defendants were interviewed. I conducted about 50 interviews and several research assistants did the rest. In addition, I spent hundreds of hours observing court proceedings including hearings in front of clerk-magistrates, talking informally to court personnel, mediators, and mediation program staff, and doing general historical and ethnographic work on the towns. Susan Silbey also did extensive ethnographic work in observing court proceedings and interviewing court personnel. Fifth, we did an ethnographic study of three small neighborhoods where interpersonal conflicts occurred fairly often. This included a survey of 93 residents of these neighborhoods about how often they had the kinds of problems we saw in mediation and what they did about them. The survey was part of a more intensive ethnographic study which included long conversations with several of the residents of these neighborhoods. I did the general ethnographic interviewing and background work in these neighborhoods and several neighborhood residents and students did the survey interviewing. In order to compare these working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods with an upper-middle-class neighborhood, in the summer of 1985 I did a similar survey and ethnographic study of an affluent suburban neighborhood. A student did the survey, while I again did more general ethnographic work on the neighborhood. See Merry, Crowd-ing, Conflict, and Neighborhood Regulation, in Neighborhood and Community Environments 35 (1. Altman & A. Wandersman ed. 1987).