The first orthodoxy is that people are puppets of social structures. According to this model, what people do is defined by ‘society’. In practice, this reduces to explaining people’s behavior as the outcome of certain ‘face-sheet’ variables (like social class, gender or ethnicity). The second orthodoxy is that people are ‘dopes’. Interview respondents’ knowledge is assumed to be imperfect; indeed they may even lie to us.
Both kinds of research are fundamentally concerned with the environment around the phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself. In quantitative studies of ‘objective’ social structures and qualitative studies of people’s ‘subjective’ orientations, we may be deflected away from the phenomenon towards what follows and precedes it (cause and consequences in ‘objective’ approach) or to how people respond to it (the ‘subjective’ approach).