Through a series of case studies, this book provides an understanding of the practice of ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of contexts, from everyday settings to formal institutions. Demonstrating that ethnography is best viewed as a series of site-specific challenges, it showcases ethnographic fieldwork as ongoing analytic engagement with concrete social worlds. From engagements with boxing and night life to preschooling and migratory encampments, portrayed is a process that is anything but a set of pre-packaged challenges and hurdles of simple-minded procedural tropes such as entree, rapport and departure. Instead, ethnography emerges as what it has been from its beginnings: a rough-and-ready analytic matter of seeking understanding in unrecognized and diverse fields of interaction. Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in the practice of ethnography and related questions of research methodology.

Through a series of case studies, this book provides an understanding of the practice of ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of contexts, from everyday settings to formal institutions. Demonstrating that ethnography is best viewed as a series of site-specific challenges, it showcases ethnographic fieldwork as ongoing analytic engagement with concrete social worlds. From engagements with boxing and night life to preschooling and migratory encampments, portrayed is a process that is anything but a set of pre-packaged challenges and hurdles of simple-minded procedural tropes such as entree, rapport and departure. Instead, ethnography emerges as what it has been from its beginnings: a rough-and-ready analytic matter of seeking understanding in unrecognized and diverse fields of interaction. Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in the practice of ethnography and related questions of research methodology.

Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that remains professionally undefined but real, even when troubles are turned into problems. This book brings into view the relationship between these worlds as it bears on the process of clientization-the transformation of people and troubles into clients and problems. Rather than taking the process for granted as many critics do, the book examines the instability of the process on several fronts and highlights its surprising local complexity. Foregrounding everyday life, the leading idea is that the transformation of troubles into problems is not straightforward and that problems are continually subject to alternative understandings. This poses new what, how, and where questions. What are ordinary troubles and how do they relate to the construction, maintenance, or undoing of serviceable problems? Where is social policy and how does that figure in the front-line work of service provision? The questions point to the challenges of clientization at the discretionary border of troubles and problems in everyday service relationships. With chapters written by an international group of human service researchers, this book is an important contribution to the literature dealing with the construction of personal problems and will be useful to students and academics in sociology, human services, social work and policy, criminal justice, and health care.

Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that remains professionally undefined but real, even when troubles are turned into problems. This book brings into view the relationship between these worlds as it bears on the process of clientization-the transformation of people and troubles into clients and problems. Rather than taking the process for granted as many critics do, the book examines the instability of the process on several fronts and highlights its surprising local complexity. Foregrounding everyday life, the leading idea is that the transformation of troubles into problems is not straightforward and that problems are continually subject to alternative understandings. This poses new what, how, and where questions. What are ordinary troubles and how do they relate to the construction, maintenance, or undoing of serviceable problems? Where is social policy and how does that figure in the front-line work of service provision? The questions point to the challenges of clientization at the discretionary border of troubles and problems in everyday service relationships. With chapters written by an international group of human service researchers, this book is an important contribution to the literature dealing with the construction of personal problems and will be useful to students and academics in sociology, human services, social work and policy, criminal justice, and health care.

Living and Dying at Murray Manor is a classic text that documents how the "work" of everyday life in a nursing home is accomplished. Jaber F. Gubrium spent several months at a nursing home as a participant-observer, involved in activities ranging from performing menial "toileting" work to serving as a gerontologist at staff meetings. The result is not a survey of statistics about nursing homes but an examination of the social organization of care in a single home the author calls Murray Manor. During his stay, Gubrium became an increasingly accepted part of life at Murray Manor and was thus able to view the institution in its natural state. His research reveals how staff, clientele, relatives, visiting physicians, and funeral directors negotiated their respective roles, needs, and goals - and how, in the end, Murray Manor emerged as an organized social entity.

The traditional lines of demarcation between service providers and service users are shifting. Professionals in managed service organizations are working to incorporate the voices of service users into their missions and the way they function, and service users, with growing access to knowledge, have taken on the semblances of professional expertise. Additionally, the human services environment has been transformed by administrative imperatives. The drive toward greater efficiency and accountability has weakened the bond between users and providers. Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is informed by the premise that the helping relationship should be seen as developing in the interactive space between those who provide human services and those who receive them. The contributors to this volume redefine the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in a range of settings, including child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. Though they advocate an experience-near approach, they remain sensitive to the ambiguities and competing rationalities of the service relationship. Taken together, these chapters reimagine the service relationship by making visible the working relevancies of service delivery.

"" At a time when more and more researchers are collecting and reproducing personal narratives, there is a pressing need for clear, sound methodological guidance. We owe a debt of gratitude to Gubrium and Holstein for the scope and rigour of their analysis. Paul Atkinson, Cardiff University, U.K. Analyzing Narrative Reality is a finely crafted and compelling argument for thinking about narratives not only as meaningful stories that help us make sense of the world, but as dynamic, ubiquitous, and profoundly important features of the social world. By subtly linking the meaning and structural integrity of narratives to the myriad social practices through which they are contingently accomplished, Gubrium and Holstein have provided a brilliant and exciting new analytic frame for the conduct of narrative research. A major contribution to a burgeoning field Darin Weinberg, University of Cambridge, U.K.Analyzing Narrative Reality offers a comprehensive framework for analyzing the construction and use of stories in society. This centers on the interplay of narrative work and narrative environments, viewed as reflexively related. Topics dealing with narrative work include activation, linkage, composition, performance, collaboration, and control. Those dealing with narrative environments include close relationships, local culture, status, jobs, organizations, and intertextuality. Both the texts and everyday contexts of the storying process are considered, with accompanying guidelines for analysis and illustrations from empirical material. Methodological procedures feature interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, and conversational and textual analysis. The conclusion raises the issue of narrative adequacy, addressing the questions of what is a good story and who is a good storyteller.

Analyzing Narrative Reality is truly multidisciplinary and should appeal to researchers working across the social and behavioral sciences and humanities, as well as to narratively focused researchers in nursing, education, allied and public health, social work, law, counseling, and management/organization studies. "

Interview books typically stress the need for establishing rapport with respondents and asking questions that don't influence the responses. Until now, no text has seriously explored who the subjects are behind interview participants.

Inside Interviewing showcases the fluctuating and diverse moral worlds put into place during interview research when gender, race, culture, age, and other subject positions are brought narratively to the foreground. It explores the communicative contexts of respondents' thoughts, feelings, and actions, and how meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning nor transported through clear respondent replies, but actively and socially assembled in the interview encounter, along with changing understandings of what it means to be a particular subject.

Topics explored include:

• The varied roles that interview participants play, alerting readers to the theoretical dimensions of subjectivity, and how this awareness can affect the interview process
• The interpretive challenges researchers face in analyzing data collected from interview respondents and their representational positions concerning the subject matter in question
• Methods for describing lives that incorporate the representational sensibilities of both interviewees and interview researchers

Inside Interviewing explores the representational complexities that emerge when research participation is scrutinized, as well as the technical concerns and analytic options that derive from new lenses for viewing the interview process. These new lenses provide readers with theoretically informed direction for figuring how interview participants relate to each other, how to elicit interview data, and how to select alternative ways of representing interview material.

This volume is comprised of chapters from the Handbook of Interview Research (Gubrium and Holstein, SAGE, 2001). The companion volume, Postmodern Interviewing (SAGE, 2003), is also comprised of chapters from the Handbook.

An exciting and comprehensive resource, "Varieties of Narrative Analysis" presents a broad spectrum of approaches to the empirical analysis of stories and storytelling. Leading researchers from different disciplines provide richly illustrated discussions of how they actually "conduct" narrative analysis from their diverse perspectives. The book's chapters focus on different ways of "doing" "data" "analysis," not data collection, although the two are related in practice. The narrative material presented ranges from media accounts, life stories, and quantitative content analysis, to storytelling occasions, embodiment, emotionality, and narrative's diverse institutional settings. Chapter coverage is comprised of background information, a discussion of methods of analysis, and illustrations of how to interpret narratives. The book is organized into three parts-analyzing stories, analyzing storytelling, and analyzing stories in society. It brings together a variety of orientations to both texts and narrative practice under one cover. The book is unique in its range of analytic and empirical vision. It will be useful to researchers and graduate students with traditional textual concerns and especially those who aim to incorporate developments crossing disciplinary borders and that address the analysis of narrative practice.

"The book provides an academic basis for discussion and development of active interviewing methods. . . . The ideas raised. . . will be interesting and valuable to those involved in developing new methodologies in qualitative research and interviewing."

--Helen Masey in Social Research Association News

The interpretive turn in social science has taken the interview and turned it upside down. Once thought to be the pipeline through which information was transmitted from a passive subject to an omniscient researcher, the new "active interview" considers the interviewer and interviewee as equal partners in constructing meaning around an interview event. This changes everything - from the way of conceiving a sample to the ways in which the interview may be conducted and the results analyzed. In this brief volume, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium outline the differences between the active interview and the traditional interview and give novice researchers clear guidance on conducting an interview that is the rich product of both parties.

Students and professionals who use qualitative methods in the fields of sociology, anthropology, communication, psychology, education, social work, gerontology, and management will find The Active Interview to be a helpful and cogent guidebook.

Constructionism has become one of the most popular research approaches in the social sciences. But until now, little attention has been given to the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the constructionist stance, and the remarkable diversity within the field. This cutting-edge handbook brings together a dazzling array of scholars to review the foundations of constructionist research, how it is put into practice in multiple disciplines, and where it may be headed in the future. The volume critically examines the analytic frameworks, strategies of inquiry, and methodological choices that together form the mosaic of contemporary constructionism, making it an authoritative reference for anyone interested in conducting research in a constructionist vein.

The second edition of this landmark volume emphasizes the dynamic, interactional, and reflexive dimensions of the research interview. Contributors highlight the myriad dimensions of complexity that are emerging as researchers increasingly frame the interview as a communicative opportunity as much as a data-gathering format. The book begins with an overview of the history and conceptual transformations of the interview, which is followed by chapters that discuss the main components of interview practice. Taken together, the contributions to the handbook encourage readers to simultaneously learn the frameworks and technologies of interviewing and reflect on the epistemological foundations of the interview craft. The handbook has been updated to address recent developments, especially in qualitative interviewing. Twenty-six chapters are completely new; the remaining twelve chapters have been substantially revised to give readers access to the state of the art of interview research. Three entirely new sections include "Logistics of Interviewing," "Self and Other in the Interview," and "Ethics of the Interview."

'This book is jam-packed with a wide range of material related to qualitative research.... [T]his is a quality text and has much to offer the reader, especially the novice researcher' - Nurse Researcher `This comprehensive collection of almost 40 chapters - each written by a leading expert in the field - is the essential reference for anyone undertaking or studying qualitative research. It covers a diversity of methods and a variety of perspectives and is a very practical and informative guide for newcomers and experienced researchers alike' - John Scott, University of Essex `The best ways in which to understand the issues and processes informing qualitative research is to learn from the accounts of its leading practitioners. Here they come together in what is a distinctive and wide-ranging collection that will appeal to postgraduates and social researchers in general' - Tim May, University of Salford `This excellent guide engages in a dialogue with a wide range of expert qualitative researchers, each of whom considers their own practice in an illuminating and challenging way. Overall, the book constitutes an authoritative survey of current methods of qualitative research data collection and analysis' - Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey This concise paperback edition of the best selling handbook, Qualitative Research Practice, is particularly aimed at the student reader. The chapters are written by leading, internationally distinguished qualitative researchers who recount and reflect on their own research experiences as well as others, past and present, from whom they have learned. It demonstrates the benefits of using particular methods from the viewpoint of real-life experience. This is also a good philosophy for students to adopt in planing research work: to begin from a practical conception of the research process and to treat a book like this as an opportunity to learn a valuable craft. From the outside, good research seems to be produced through practitioners learning and following standard theoretical, empirical and procedural formats. But from the inside we learn that qualitative research (like other forms of scientific endeavour) is also a biographical engagement, rendering its scholarly and practical contributions in its own terms. Standards take on practical meaning as the distinct activities of qualitative research resonate throughout the enterprise, complicating its accountability to itself and to others. In an authoritative yet accessible manner, Qualitative Research Practice reveals the special features of this engagement, teaching us that qualitative research is as much a craft and practice as it is a way of knowing. Presenting a comprehensive examination of contemporary and traditional varieties of qualitative research practice, Qualitative Research Practice will be an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in any discipline. It is an essential and definitive guide to the major forms of qualitative methods in use today, written by leaders in the relevant fields of research practice.

Since "family" takes on such highly varied forms, any discussion of what it is, who it is, or what family life is like is bound to be complicated--perhaps even controversial. Couples, Kids, and Family Life examines these issues in an engaging and insightful way, approaching the realm of family from "the inside out." Offering a distinctive view of what the social worlds of family life might look like from the standpoint of "insiders," it examines family perspectives and scenarios though the eyes of partners, parents, children, and significant others. Featuring a series of specially commissioned chapters by leading scholars in the field, the book uses real-life examples to present a distinctive look at the social worlds of domestic life.
Divided into three parts, Couples, Kids, and Family Life includes discussion questions after each chapter, suggesting ways of approaching the key concerns laid out in each section. Part I, "Couples," focuses on married or soon-to-be married partners, addressing such topics as romanticism and realism in marriage, the categories of husband and wife, and marital equality. Part II, "Parents and Kids," examines the perspectives of different actors in the family drama, concentrating on their various reactions to domestic challenges like teenagers' whereabouts, using the car, and gender socialization. Part III, "Rearrangements," deals with family change, including the process of divorce, remarriage, and stepparenting.

Interview roles are less clear than they once were, and in some cases, the roles are even exchanged to promote new opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and experience.

Constructing the Life Course offers a social constructionist perspective on personal experience through time. The text shows the variety of ways people use life course imagery in their everyday lives and makes a useful addition to family studies or gerontology courses.

The Self We Live By confronts the serious challenges facing the self in postmodern times. Taking issue with contemporary trivializations of the self, the book traces a course of development from the early pragmatists who formulated what they called the 'empirical self', to contemporary constructionist views of the storied self. Presenting an institutional context for the increasing complexity and ubiquity of narrative identity, the authors illustrate the 'everyday technology of self construction' and idscuss the resulting moral climate. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in courses such as Individual in Society, Contemporary American Society, Social Psychology, Social Interaction and Culture & Personality.

In recent years, scholars and researchers have moved away from quantitative methods of research and toward qualitative methods, which emphasize questions of meaning and interpretation. Gubrium and Holstein offer a new theoretical view which reintegrates the traditional emphasis on the "how" and "what" of social life with a contemporary understanding of the "why". The authors demonstrate how their approach may be put into practice in research on family, aging, deviance and social problems, and organizations and institutions.

In a unique comparative ethnography of two family therapy programs, Gubrium deftly shows how differing organizational perceptions make visible the social construction of domestic disorder. Contrasting images of home life--one viewing domestic order as a system of authority, the other as a configuration of emotional bonds--serve to highlight different senses of the family as being out of control and to recommend alternate forms of intervention. The idea that the reality of home life and domestic troubles are embedded in organizational activities and institutional images is an important commentary on the understanding of domestic life and the postmodern family. Out of Control provides stimulating reading for professionals and students in clinical psychology, family therapy, family studies, sociology, and qualitative methods.

In a unique comparative ethnography of two family therapy programs, Gubrium deftly shows how differing organizational perceptions make visible the social construction of domestic disorder. Contrasting images of home life--one viewing domestic order as a system of authority, the other as a configuration of emotional bonds--serve to highlight different senses of the family as being out of control and to recommend alternate forms of intervention. The idea that the reality of home life and domestic troubles are embedded in organizational activities and institutional images is an important commentary on the understanding of domestic life and the postmodern family. Out of Control provides stimulating reading for professionals and students in clinical psychology, family therapy, family studies, sociology, and qualitative methods.