Jaber F. Gubrium

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Department of Sociology

Focused on the site-specificity, imagined subjectivities, and procedural tolerance of ethnographic fieldwork in practice.

Stories and storytelling are found everywhere, from an overall cultural presence to the narrative study of self and society. Within a tradition of sociological research stemming from the 1920s, this chapter discusses the narrative study of self and society in the context of social interaction. Three forms of narrative study and aims are distinguish...

Anthology on the substance and craft of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in human service settings.

This chapter frames the interview as an actively constructed conversation through which narratives are produced. It views empirical results as by-products of narrative practice, distinguishing the whats and hows of a communicative process involving the active subjectivity of interview participants. The framing has profound implications for how inte...

Serious attention to the fluid complexity of lived experience throws intriguing light on residential choices in later life. Fluidity comes in the form of time, which shifts in both novel and patterned ways as one ages. Decisions in time not only follow well-documented patterns, but interpersonal and intersectional considerations, both retrospective...

An analytic vocabulary is presented for discerning and documenting the reflexive interplay of novelty and pattern in life narratives. Illustrations of "methodical" and "substantive" novelty are drawn from a cross-institutional corpus of ethnographic material. Concluding remarks center on overdrawn depictions of the rationalization of everyday life.

The lecture presented narrative material to demonstrate the situated interpretive contours of interviews and stories.

Featured stories as the practical constructions of narrative circumstances.

Juxtaposed structural and pragmatist approaches to narrativity, contrasting textual and ethnographic material.

Outlined a narrative approach to ethnographic fieldwork.

Conceptualizing the research consequences of the institutional embeddedness of narrative material.

In contrast to the popularity of various "grounded" approaches to ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter turns to theoretical strategies that can inspire field understandings. From seeing culture as narrative, to discovering to social worlds and to documenting collaborative accomplishment, the significance of the conceptual frameworks that guide the...

Applies a vocabulary that makes the self visible as a project of everyday life. This book begins with the social self as envisioned early in the 20th century. Then the authors trace its movement from its ordinary social conditioning to its current existential dilemmas and crumbling experiential moorings. Part I revisits, then revises, this story of...

Aspects of the conceptualization of narrative practice.

Exemplifying aspects of a critical ethnography of narrative practice.

Wing-Chung Ho offers an extensive critique of what he calls our "radical constructionist approach to family experience" questioning the theoretical validity and empirical utility of the research program. This article responds to the charges in the broader context of the program's constructionist analytics, discussing family's experiential location,...

What counts as working information in the institutional context of aging and care.

The new 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 the hi...

Based on data gathered in settings where the family side of personal troubles is a regular concern, it is argued that the family enters into social relations as a collective representation. Adaptmg Durkheim's usage to everyday life, the family is analyzed as a ‘public’ project of those whose domestic affairs are challenged for consideration of fami...

Mel Pollner regularly cautioned researchers not to argue with the members of settings under consideration. He warned against substituting the researcher’s meaning for the meanings of those being studied. This article discusses facets of the caution as they relate to the research process. Seemingly simple, the tenet is nuanced in application. The ar...

Discusses and empirically exemplifies the situated ”thereness” of life stories.

Considering the situated construction of narrative recollection.

While family is a broadly recognized and widely researched social form, this article brackets that in order to develop its narrative organization. Of special consideration is the use of family for describing and conveying the structural and moral borders of non-familial relationships.

Applying George Herbert Mead’s ”presentist” philosophy to family recollection.

Living and Dying at Murray Manor (Gubrium (1975)1997) is the first book- length ethnography of a nursing home. It is the touchstone for similar con- tributions dealing with what came to be called the "culture of long term care" (Henderson & Vesperi 1995). In revisiting the Murray Manor project, I'll describe how the research began, especially how I...

Applying the method of analytic bracketing to social interaction.

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...

O nce upon a time, stories were told and written for what they were about. The ancients wrote love stories, recorded histories of military campaigns, produced treatises on flora and fauna, medical texts, and philosophical discourses, and recounted oral histories of countless domains of experience. Some told of the emotions, some of strategic action...

The everyday ”field work” of participants in ethnography fieldwork. Consider the working ”heres” and ”theres” of situated social interaction.

This article reviews recent developments in constructionist approaches to life course studies. It outlines the general tenets of social constructionism and compares and contrasts two contemporary constructionist perspectives on the life course.

The sociology of description in the context of social service practice.

The 1920s was the era of the city. The urban population of the USA for the first time exceeded the population of rural areas and the nascent institutions of city life were flourishing. This article discusses the urban ethnography of the era with a focus on the way women and work was conceptualized, especially how ‘the city’ figured in explanation....

The situated embeddedness of life stories in the context of aging.

Addressing the question of the usefulness of qualitative empirical material.

Consider accounts of experience in interactional and institutional context.

Agency and structure in the social construction of life stories.

Offers a distinctive view of what the social worlds of family life might look like from the standpoint of "insiders."

Qualitative researchers tout the distinctive character of their work as thickly descriptive of the subject matter. They evaluate published results in the same terms, giving high marks to the richness of the best research. This article unpacks this universal standard and discusses the influence of preinvestigative empirical purview, analytic aims, a...

In this article, the authors explore the narrative production of stroke from the perspectives of survivors, that is, the stroke itself, not its implications for the individual poststroke. In the vast amount of literature on both sudden onset and chronic illness, the narrative construction of the onset of the illness, for the most part, has been ign...

The everyday work and conditions of descriptions of recovery in rehabilitation.

The everyday inaccuracies of measurement in human services.

Ethnographic data were collected at two rehabilitation facilities conducting ongoing research to evaluate functional and neurological outcomes of constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT). Our findings indicate that several patterns of behavior occur during participant/therapist interaction in therapy sessions: coaching, cheerleading, reminding, c...

In postmodern discourse, self is displaced as a central presence in experience and reappropriated as yet another personal signifier. This paper describes key postmodern views, then reframes postmodern vocabulary in terms of interpretive practice. It argues that the postmodern framing of self is too abstract and that a distinctly modern discourse fo...

The postmodern challenge to sociological notions of individual agency assails its experiential substantiality, conveying agency instead in philosophically abstract terms and fleeting media images. In opposition to this, we argue that everyday interpretive practive reflexively constructs agency, utilizing resources drawn from the ordinary contours o...

A recent move toward patient rights in long-term care institutions is the inclusion of the patient in the planning of care and treatment. This paper describes how the strategic problem for staffers of patient participation in care staffings is managed. Data were collected by participant observation in five nursing homes and are organized in terms o...

Using Mead, Mills, and Foucault to understand the (public) everyday construction of (private) inner life

The ”history of the present” as a point of departure for the constructionist analysis of troubled subjects in human service institutions

This paper reports findings related to the transition from hospital to home during the first month after discharge following acute stroke. Qualitative data were obtained from in-depth, semistructured interviews with 51 male stroke survivors and their caregivers. Data were analyzed with the N6 software application, designed to assist with qualitativ...

Applying a sensitizing concept in the analysis of identity construction in human service institutions

The conceptual framework of biographical disruption has dominated studies into the everyday experience of chronic illness. Biographical disruption assumes that the illness presents the person with an intense crisis, regardless of other mitigating factors. However, our data suggests that the lives of people who have a particular illness that is nota...

A critical approach to the idea of personal coherence life stories

what abstract and (wrongly in our view) irrelevant.The chapters in this book, therefore, are written by leading ,research practitioners who ,recount and reflect on their ,own research experience as well as that of others from whom,they have learned. If we privilege practice over principles – or at least link them together as principles-in- practice...

Shifts the usual focus from the structure and content of stories to the process and context of storytelling, from the whats to the hows of narrativity. In that vein, the answer to the question centers on what story is good enough for the practical purposes at hand.

Functional assessment in stroke recovery extends beyond formal testing and evaluation. Stroke survivors themselves continuously engage in the process of reckoning their functional capacities as they go about their everyday lives. This process is called benchmarking. The aim of this article is to discuss and illustrate how it operates in three areas...