A thick description typically adds a record of subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behaviors, making the collected data of greater value for studies by other social scientists.
However, the predominant sense in which it is used today was developed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) to characterise his own method of doing ethnography.
[1] Since then, the term and the methodology it represents has gained widespread currency, not only in the social sciences but also, for example, in the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism.
The school of ethnography thought seemingly arbitrary events could convey important notions of understanding that could be lost at a first glance.
[5] Similarly Bronisław Malinowski put forth the concept of a native point of view in his 1922 work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
He was against comprehensive theories of human behavior; rather, he advocated methodologies that highlight culture from the perspective of how people looked at and experienced life.
The ability of thick descriptions to showcase the totality of a situation to aid in the overall understanding of findings was called mélange of descriptors.
Because of this, ethnographic observations must rely on the context of the population being studied by understanding how the participants come to recognize actions in relation to one another and to the overall structure of the society in a specific place and time.
[14][15] Geertz's thick-description approach, along with the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology,[9][5] enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures, organizations, and historical settings.
However, despite its dissemination among the disciplines, some theorists[16] pushed back on thick description, skeptical about its ability to somehow interpret meaning by compiling large amounts of data.