Telling the code: Instructions for interpretation (Continued)
They told me that trying to get another man to talk about his life was just like snitching, because you were getting him to cop out on himself. They spoke of guys' talking about themselves. In their terms, a "good grouper" was likely to be a "kiss-ass."
Through bits and pieces of moral characterization like those above, the code could be assembled...I began to see that the difficulty I was experiencing [residents' reluctance to talk to Wieder] was produced by the same phenomenon that I was trying to investigate. I came to see that my experience of not being able to join conversations over the dinner table, although conversations were going on all around me, was being produced by the code that I was trying to explicate.
Residents were doing much more than merely reporting on the features o their lives when they "told the code."