This chapter introduces the tools adopted for exploring everyday association-making in the author’s ethnographic research, in theoretical, analytical and methodological terms. First, it presents the origins of the civic action approach on which this study draws to analyse the styles of everyday association-making. Then it defines the three different ways the variable of ‘scene styles’ was used in the research process: with respect to the filtering role exerted between general contextual factors and their situated implications, at the level of everyday practices; demonstrating how associative styles are not neutral filters, given that they shape the initiatives carried out by the third sector and their outcomes; and investigating the origins of scene styles and the factors that account for their spread or relative decline.