The call for testimonials: Exploring the self-production of sanitary masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article presents a method rarely used in sociology – the Call For Testimonials (CFT) – which consists of collecting written accounts of the experience of a large number of actors about a given social fact. This method provides a profuse amount of qualitative data, whose characteristics (spontaneous versus solicited, objective versus subjective, guided versus freely oriented) need to be described in order to make the best use of them through mixed analytical treatments. After characterizing the data collected, the article presents the mixed and combined analytic treatments to which they lend themselves. The example of the self-production of masks at the beginning of the COVID crisis helps to illustrate the potential of such treatments.