I employ spoken and written discourse and extended excerpts from teleconferences between local, state, and federal officials in the midst of Hurricane Katrina to examine the term coordination as one powerful way of accounting for and pragmatically (re)constructing weather in crisis discourse. By means of discourse analysis, I find that the indexical term coordination is part of a metadiscursive vocabulary of disaster, and that, though it performs important social functions in the communication of accountability, authority, and redress, it has very little to do with communicating about weather itself. My conclusion presses for a discursive approach as a means of recovering and understanding social ontologies like weather and the way we materially organize around themes what Latour refers to “matters of concern.” Relevance: It analyzes how notions of weather and disaster are constructed in language.

Social science methods of data collection, such as surveys, participant observations, experiments and even text analyses, are characterized by social interactions between the social scientist and the object under study (people, organizations, texts). From a constructivist perspective, the relationship between method and empirical result reflects the relationship between observer (or observing system) and observed (system). The notion of reactivity means that the method of observation interferes with the process of observation in such a way that the results of observation are biased. Within epistemological realism reactivity is considered a cause for invalid data or results. In contrast to this position, constructivism regards reactivity a social process of its own, which is helpful in understanding how the observed system operates. Thus, social scientific methods are no neutral tools of measurement or observer-independent observations but are the observer’s operations of constructing the observed system by interfering the operations of the observed system. Relevance: Constructivism provides a different understanding of the phenomenon of reactivity than realism does.

Key words: research methods, reactivity, reflexivity