The Dirty Process of Creating Clean Absence Data: An Ethnographic Study

ABSTRACT

In this ethnographic study, I present a single school’s practice of registering and analysing absence from school. I show that teachers use various “dirty,” interpretational contexts for understanding absence and make it classifiable in “clean” attendance categories – a move that decontextualises the meaning of absence. When others in turn handle absence using such “clean,” decontextualised data, they treat the many various absences as a single, compressed “absence pattern,” a pattern which is explained in terms of a single reason derived from recontextualising the absence. I show that this process effectively excludes parents’ and youths’ own ways of interpreting absence. I argue from this that research should be mindful of the political nature of absence data, and that negotiating and gaining familiarity with children is a positive contribution to understanding absence and not unwanted dirt.

KEYWORDS:

• Absence from school
• context
• analysing data
• meaning
• school registration

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank everyone at Summerfield who made the study possible. Second, I would like to thank my wife, my friend Alexander Ramsay, and my colleagues for reading and providing helpful comments to my drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).