What is Harold Garfinkel’s ‘Documentary method’?

Garfinkel argues that members employ the ‘documentary method’ to make sense and account for the social world and to give it an appearance of order.

This method consists of selecting certain aspects of the infinite number of features contained in any situation or context, of defining them in a particular way and seeing them as evidence of an underlying pattern. The process is then reversed and particular instances of the underlying pattern are then used as evidence for the existence of the pattern In Garfinkel’s words, the documentary of’, as “pointing to”, as “standing on behalf of a presupposed underlying pattern.