In January 2014, President Barack Obama made headlines when he confided to New Yorker reporter Davis Remnick that, if he had a son, he would discourage him from playing in the NFL. "I would not let my son play pro football," he told the writer. Obama's words came on the heels of a year of heightened awareness of the life-long consequences of a professional football career. In August 2013, the NFL agreed to a $765 million settlement with over 4,500 retired players seeking damages for head injuries sustained during play. Thousands of others are seeking disability benefits in the Sate of California for on-field injuries. But the possibility of lifelong disability is not the only problem facing professional football players after their playing careers--often brief to begin with--come to an end. Many players, having spent years focusing on football, find themselves at sea when they either leave or are forced out of the NFL, without any alternate life plans or even the resources to make them. Is There Life After Football? draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives after their football days are over. It also incorporates stories about their playing careers, even before entering the NFL, to provide context for understanding their current situations.The authors begin with an analysis of the "bubble"-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, conditions that often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also examines the key issues affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries. From players who make reckless and unsustainable financial investments during their very few high-earning years, to players who struggle to form personal and professional relationships outside of football, the stories in the book put a very human face on the realities of the world of professional football. George Koonce Jr., a former NFL player himself, weaves in his own story throughout, explaining the challenges and setbacks he encountered and decisions that helped him succeed as an NFL Director of Player Development, PhD student, and university administrator after leaving the sport. Ultimately, Is There Life After Football? concludes that, despite the challenges players face, it is possible for players to find success after leaving the NFL if they have the right support, education, and awareness of what might await them. But players themselves must also resist being totally engulfed by the NFL culture in which they live. A fascinating study with unprecedented insider access, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the world of professional football.

This book analyzes how hearing participants construct and organize arguments that are legally, psychiatrically, and practically accountable. It argues that commitment decisions orient to the "tenability" of situations that patients pose as alternatives to hospitalization.

This series is designed to foster debates on the sociology of social problems by presenting a forum where sociologists of this discipline can present and argue opposed positions on epistemological, moral and political issues that are central to the field.

This series is designed to foster debates on the sociology of social problems by presenting a forum where sociologists of this discipline can present and argue opposed positions on epistemological, moral and political issues that are central to the field.

This series is designed to foster debates on the sociology of social problems by presenting a forum where sociologists of this discipline can present and argue opposed positions on epistemological, moral and political issues that are central to the field.

This book, about involuntary commitment proceedings, focuses on interpretive practice at the nexus of legal, psychiatric, and practical reasoning. It describes the interactional dynamics through which legally and psychiatrically warranted decisions are publicly argued, negotiated, and justified.

"Constructionist Controversies" reviews the substantial contributions to social problems theory that have been made by social constructionist theorists and examines debates about the future of this perspective. Intended for the student, the volume provides a succinct formulation of all the major issues of social constructionism by contributors who are well recognized within the field for the strength with which they articulate their own widely varied viewpoints.

Constructionist Controversies reviews the substantial con- tributions to social problems theory that have been made by social constructionist theorists and examines debates about the future of this perspective. Intended for the student, the volume provides a succinct formulation of all the major issues of social constructionism by contributors who are well recognized within the field for the strength with which they articulate their own widely varied viewpoints.

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.

Perspectives on Social Problems

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.

"" 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. "

The social constructionist perspective has revolutionized the way that social scientists investigate social problems. "Constructing Social Problems" (Spector and Kitsuse 1977] 2001) offered the guiding statement of the approach, which both transformed and revitalized the sociology of social problems, propelling it into a quarter century of exciting and innovative empirical research. John Kitsuse and Malcolm Spector challenged conventional approaches to the field; they insisted on treating social problems as social constructions--as the products of claims-making and constitutive definitional processes.
The purpose of this book is to highlight contemporary challenges to the social constructionist perspective on social problems. In 1993, two collections of essays, "Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory" (Holstein and Miller 1993) and "Constructionist Controversies: Issues in Social Problems Theory" (Miller and Holstein 1993), brought a wide variety of constructionist challenges into focus. "Challenges and Choices" attempts to distill these debates, and offers some compelling suggestions for how challenges may be met and where constructionist studies might proceed in the future. While each of the essays in this volume deeply appreciates the constructionist approach, each of them points to issues and choices that social constructionists must confront if the perspective is to continue to be a vital part of ongoing debates on social problems. The essays critique previous constructionist formulations; make suggestions for advancing, expanding, or diversifying the constructionist agenda; and challenge the perspective to move in new directions.
They remind us that social constructionism is an ongoing, not a finished, product, and the essays point to some of the choices available to social constructionists in moving their projects into new, even uncharted, territories.
"James A. Holstein" and "Gale Miller" are professors in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

2016 Best Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport A human face on the realities of professional football, from the challenges players face after leaving the NFL to the factors that can enable them to continue to find success Is There Life After Football? draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives playing the sport and after their football days are over. The "bubble"-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also reveals the difficulties affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries. From players who make reckless and unsustainable financial investments during their very few high-earning years, to players who struggle to form personal and professional relationships outside of football, the stories in the book put a very human face on the realities of professional football. George Koonce Jr., a former NFL player himself, weaves in his own story throughout, explaining the challenges he encountered and decisions that helped him succeed after leaving the sport. Ultimately, Is There Life After Football? concludes that, despite the challenges players face, it is possible for players to find success after leaving the NFL if they have the right support, education, and awareness of what might await them.