Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Narrative research has become increasingly popular in the social sciences. While no part of the process is easy, researchers often struggle to make sense of data that can seem chaotic and without a discernable pattern. This book shows how to analyze stories, storytelling, and stories in society, bringing together a variety of approaches to both texts and narrative practice under one cover...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Written and edited by social gerontologists, and focusing on everyday experiences, these essays draw from original case studies to look at the diverse ways of growing and being older. Collects ten original essays on the aging experience, written by prominent social gerontologists. Highlights diverse ways of growing and being older. Offers detailed portraits of a broad range of experiences, including those of the homeless, the retirement community, sexual nonconformists, and the disabled. Addresses stereotypes of the aging process and provides diverse examples of individual experiences.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Postmodern Interviewing offers readers an exploration of the postmodern interview, a conversation with diverse purposes in which the communicative format is constructed as much within the interview conversation as it stems from predesignated research interests...read more

(view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Aging and Everyday Life presents a balanced and realistic view of the aging experience. The research in this book reveals that much, if not most, of the triumphs and trials experienced in later years are not unlike those confronted at other points in life. Just like younger people, the elderly experience both change and stability, shedding old roles and entering new ones. The process takes place in varied spheres of life: the worlds of home and family, work, and friendship. This thoughtful, engaging text brings together twenty-eight essays by leading researchers in social gerontology to explore the everyday aspects of aging. Readers will come away viewing the elderly as people whose lives are as complex and diverse, and therefore as nuanced as any. (view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: 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. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The self is a big story. In the early part of the century, pragmatists like William James, Charles Horton Cooley, and George Herbert Mead turned away from the transcendental self of philosophical reflection to formulate the new concept of an empirical selfthe notion that who and what we are is established in everyday interaction. The self was now a social structure, as Mead put it, even if it was located within the individual.The story has changed dramatically since then. Today, according to some postmodern critics, the self has been cast adrift on a sea of disparate images. Its just one swirling representation among others, bandied about the frenzy of a media-driven society. At the turn of the 21st century, the self has lost its traditional groundings and fizzled empirically. The self's very existence is seriously being questioned.The Self We Live By resurrects the big story by taking issue with this account. Holstein and Gubrium have crafted a comprehensive discussion that traces a different course of development, from the early pragmatists to contemporary constructionist considerations, rescuing the self from the scrap-heap of postmodern imagery. Glimpses of renewal are located in a new kind of ending, centered in an institutional landscape of diverse narratives, articulated in relation to an expanding horizon of identities. Not only is there a new story of the self, but were told that the self, itself, is narratively constructed. Yet as varied and plentiful as narrative identity has become, its disciplined by its social practices, which the authors discuss and illustrate in terms of the everyday technology of self construction. The empirical self, it turns out, has become more complex and varied than its formulators could have imagined.

Describes professional care, facilities, and patient activities at one nonprofit, Church-related nursing home. (view table of contents)

In recent years scholars and researchers in all disciplines have moved away from traditional quantitative methods of research to more qualitative methods which emphasize questions of meaning and interpretation. Considering research methodologies as a set of idioms, The New Language of Qualitative Method examines alternate vocabularies for conveying social reality. It offers a new theoretical view which reintegrates the traditional emphasis on the whats of social life with a contemporary understanding of the hows and whys. The text considers the basic presumptions, objectives, and research questions of four major research traditions: naturalism, ethnomethodology, emotionalism, and postmodernism. Using illustrations from classic texts, it shows how each idiom supplies a unique perspective on empirical reality. The text then examines the risks and rewards of each approach, offering a vision of a renewed language of inquiry that accommodates both traditional and contemporary concerns. Striving for balance, the authors not only contend with issues from alternate perspectives, but provide a basis for rapprochement between research traditions that have often remained isolated from each other. They also demonstrate how each approach may be used for research on family, aging, deviance and social problems, and organizations and institutions. Written in an accessible and engaging style, The New Language of Qualitative Method can be adopted in courses across the social sciences, and may also be used by a broad spectrum of qualitative researchers. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This volume of original articles by leading researchers explores the methodological possibilities and difficulties involved in doing qualitative work with the aged. The contributors illustrate, with numerous examples, the strengths of qualitative strategies and techniques for uncovering meaning, dissecting processes, and examining cultural and other issues of difference between people and groups...read more

Product Description: In one of his earlier books, Living and Dying at Murray Manor, the author availed himself of ethnographic techniques to explore the experience of life in a nursing home. This volume extends that exploration to an assessment of the quality of long-term care provided to residents of nursing homes, and of the resulting quality of lives...read more

Product Description: With articles reprinted from the Journal of Aging, this book focuses on ageing, the self and community. Topics discussed include: human action and its place in theories of ageing; the impact of emotional support for single women; and old people's organizations as a context for ageing...read more

Product Description: Counselling techniques that can help families regain control and causes of families breaking up are among the topics explored in this ethnographic account of therapeutic sessions. Two very different views of what a family is and how it becomes `out of control' emerge, resulting in vastly different therapeutic approaches...read more

Product Description: As policy and and financial restrictions increase for hospitals and health care agencies, households will be faced with caring for a family member who becomes acutely or chronically ill. This volume addresses the problems associated with this move from institution to the home; contributors discuss the home as sickroom, patterns of caregiving in the family and the interaction of the judicial process and social services; practical advice about planning a sick room is also included...read more

Product Description: As policy and and financial restrictions increase for hospitals and health care agencies, households will be faced with caring for a family member who becomes acutely or chronically ill. This volume addresses the problems associated with this move from institution to the home; contributors discuss the home as sickroom, patterns of caregiving in the family and the interaction of the judicial process and social services; practical advice about planning a sick room is also included...read more