Membership Categorization Analysis in Qualitative Psychology

Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) is one of the ethnomethodological analytic approaches (alongside Conversation Analysis) that is widely used by qualitative psychologists. In prioritizing people’s practices of constructing and using social categories, MCA has the unique potential to enrich a qualitative inquiry into our practices of making sense of the social world around us and accomplishing social action. Using MCA, qualitative psychologists have respecified social categories from being treated as explanations for behaviour to practices and resources that people develop and use to accomplish social action. This effort to treat categories as people’s business is an important tool in the repertoire of qualitative psychologists in studying human behaviour and social action.