The Grammar of rules-in-use

Abstract

Rules-in-use, including formal and informal rules, are key to human interactions. Using the Institutional Grammar to analyze rules-in-use can provide some insights to understand the diversity of rules, compliance with existing rules, or to study other aspects such as emotional consequences, customs, or social norms that cannot be studied when analyzing formal rules from written regulations or bylaws. However, applying the institutional grammar to qualitative data from interviews or focus groups is far from straightforward. Here we present a protocol designed to facilitate the process of studying rules-in-use with the Institutional Grammar. This protocol includes a detailed description of how to: 1) properly design an interview guide in order to obtain a large number of institutional statements and all the grammatical components of each statement, 2) correctly identify and transform raw statements into institutional statements to increase replicability, 3) apply the Institutional Grammar, and 4) calculate intercoder reliability from interviews. With this protocol, we hope to advance the study of rules-in-use as an essential analysis for understanding collective action and the outcomes of human interactions.