Temporal Perspectives, Popular Classes and Ethnography

What is it like to live being poor? Understanding the experience of families benefiting from public programs for having been classified as "poor" has been the objective of previous research. The inquiry moves away from the central concern of the monitoring and evaluation system of the programs that attend to the predefined and generally registered results with binary variables (return to the educational system, work for more than three consecutive months, vaccinate the child, perform annual medical control, etc.)-. Inquiring about the experiences, the meanings, the strategies that are deployed when living in certain material and social conditions requires other techniques to capture the object and other languages to communicate it. Ethnography is proposed as the appropriate approach for this, as a non-sequential combination of data collection techniques and especially analysis. The discussion focuses on the issue of temporality as a key dimension to understand the power of the approach.