I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve always been fascinated by what people say to each other and what they say to themselves. When I was a little girl, I had an old-fashioned tape recorder, a bulky black device with heavy keys you would press hard on to get a cassette tape working. My father was in the U.S. Army, and he would have poker parties once a week with his Army buddies. On those days, I would slide the tape recorder under the card table and press play just before they sat down to play. Oh, the stories I heard! Things a ten-year-old should probably not hear! I would listen and use my children’s typewriter to recreate the dialogue. I thought I could make stories this way. I never got to the making of the stories, but this turned out to be an incredibly helpful practice for my later career as a qualitative researcher/sociologist. Although I would never record someone without their permission, I have recorded a lot of people, made transcripts of those recordings, and analyzed those stories for knowledge about the world. Now I teach other people how to do those things, too. I hope you find this textbook helpful and that it inspires you to listen to the people around you and observe the world with fresh eyes.