Driven by both theory and practice, this accessible book will help you get to grips with understanding and doing grounded theory from a constructivist perspective.

Driven by both theory and practice, this accessible book will help you get to grips with understanding and doing grounded theory from a constructivist perspective.

An engaging text that enables readers to understand the world through symbolic interactionism

This lively and accessible book offers an introduction to sociological social psychology through the lens of symbolic interactionism. It provides students with an accessible understanding of this perspective to illuminate their worlds and deepen their knowledge of other people's lives, as well as their own. Written by noted experts in the field, the book explores the core concepts of social psychology and examines a collection of captivating empirical studies. The book also highlights everyday life--putting the focus on the issues and concerns that are most relevant to the readers' social context.

The Social Self and Everyday Life bridges classical theories and contemporary ideas, joins abstract concepts with concrete examples, and integrates theory with empirical evidence. It covers a range of topics including the body, emotions, health and illness, the family, technology, and inequality. Best of all, it gets students involved in applying concepts in their daily lives.

• Demonstrates how to use students' social worlds, experiences, and concerns to illustrate key interactionist concepts in a way that they can emulate
• Develops key concepts such as meaning, self, and identity throughout the text to further students' understanding and ability to use them
• Introduces students to symbolic interactionism, a major theoretical and research tradition within sociology
• Helps to involve students in familiar experiences and issues and shows how a symbolic interactionist perspective illuminates them
• Combines the best features of authoritative summaries, clear definitions of key terms, with enticing empirical excerpts and attention to popular ideas

Clear and inviting in its presentation, The Social Self and Everyday Life: Understanding the World Through Symbolic Interactionism is an excellent book for undergraduate students in sociology, social psychology, and social interaction.

This innovative collection offers a fresh look at health, healing, and illness--providing a bridge between human experience and social policies and practices. The book brings people with illness into the foreground; it goes beyond patient's roles and into their lives--emphasizing the gap between the acute care model and the needs of the chronically ill.

The readings link personal accounts with structural problems, inviting students to identify with these authors and to see the social issues within their stories. Selections are accessible and edited for succinctness. Section and chapter introductions bring the articles into focus and guide student reading. Discussion questions stimulate critical thinking, and suggested readings direct students to pivotal references.

Throughout the book, coverage demonstrates how gender, race, class, and age affect patients and players within the health-care system. Stories help students reexamine their assumptions about medical care shoulds and oughts and to think critically about future priorities and trends. Other articles cover:

* Illness and identity
* Care and control
* Becoming a person with HIV disease
* The damaged self
* Rationing medical care
* Marketing rehabilitation goods and services
* The problematic nature of defining health
* Socioeconomic differences in health service

Kathy Charmaz has written a compelling book on chronic illness and the effect it has on the self-concepts of those who suffer. It will appeal to anyone facing a long-term problem that seems beyond control. Her work is based on interviews with people suffering from such diseases as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis, and with their caregivers. Charmaz looks at how these people disclose their illness, how they experience their emotions, and how they manage daily life.

Illness provides a mirror that allows sufferers to see themselves and to become more introspective. As they struggle for control over illness and control over time, they also struggle to control the central images of the self. For example, the chronically ill may situate their self-concepts in the past, present, or future. Charmaz examines under what conditions they situate their self-concepts in each of those timeframes. People may say they live one day at a time. They may bracket certain experiences, such as a heart attack, as timemarkers or turning points in the past. Or they may look ahead to recovering their health. Or ahead to death.

Charmaz artfully combines near jargon-free analysis with moving stories about how people have experienced illness, usually told in the sufferers' own words. She enters the world of the chronically ill, and brings us into it.

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.