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Video in Qualitative Research by Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh, and Paul Luff is the first comprehensive book about the methods of video analysis that is available in English. It is written as an introduction into the practice of video analysis, and as such the authors provide guidance for conceptualizing research projects as well as advice on the ethical issues and practical problems of producing video recordings in the field. The text sketches out the process of conducting a detailed analysis of data and works through the theoretical issues of using the context of interaction recorded on video. The book also provides a useful discussion and some helpful advice for publishing results, while the last chapter is devoted to new developments in such research fields as surveillance studies, health-care communication, and museum studies. The book’s title makes clear that it is not about studying forms of video that have been produced by actors (such as movies and YouTube clips) but about an approach that combines methodological elements from conversation analysis and ethnographies of social situations that focus on the study of interactions. The interpretive approach outlined here is different from quantitative forms of video analysis that involve counting and coding certain events (this is an approach that is mostly used in education and psychology; cf. Koch and Zumbach 2002). Where some other authors who address the methodology of visual data in ethnographic research seem to leave the discussion of the solution of practical research problems in favor of excessive discussions of theoretical issues such as the role of the researcher in the field and his or her reflexivity, this book offers some grounded guidance based on practical experience in concrete research projects. Audiovisual recordings, and especially video, can be seen as the most relevant and interesting form of data that can be used to study interaction. It seems quite obvious that video technology offers advanced means of recording and analyzing BOOK REVIEW

Currently in the United States, rates of HPV (human papillomavirus) and HSV (herpes simplex virus) continue to rise, yet HPV vaccinations are marketed as cancer prevention, conveniently avoiding focus on the sexual transmission of the disease they hope to prevent. Thus, while commercials for products like Gardasil and the prescription medication Valtrex are publicly visible, there is little dialogue about the nature of these STDs or the individuals who have contracted such infections. In Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Adina Nack explores the medical and social implications for women diagnosed with genital herpes or HPV or both, recounting compelling narratives of misinformation, diagnosis and treatment experiences, stigma development and management, and chronic illness. Nack begins with her own autoethnographic account of learning about her exposure to and eventual diagnosis of HPV, and offers full detail of her experience in the subsequent appendix. Her story is moving, vivid, and contextualizes her standpoint on both women’s experiences with STDs and her motivation for becoming a sexual health researcher and advocate for sexual education. Nack’s frank discussion of her experience, along with the benefits and challenges it created for engaging her research, is an excellent model of personal ethnography in tandem with well-executed ethnographic interviewing and analysis. Data consist of interviews with forty-three women who have contracted genital herpes or HPV or both, and volunteered for the research after hearing about Nack’s work. A detailed methodological appendix recounts the challenges involved, including negotiating the roles of researcher and sexual educator when respondents recounted inaccurate information about the nature of their disease. The book is

When the esteemed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested in his own home by Cambridge police in July 2009, many people were outraged and logged on to the Internet to find more information. Among the “information” that Web users could find were multiple written accounts and visual images of the incident. There was a photo—taken by a neighbor—of Gates handcuffed on his own front porch and visibly, understandably, angry. There were the grainy mug shots—released by Cambridge police—of Gates looking humiliated and resigned. And there were photos of Sergeant James Crowley, the arresting officer, looking defiant (he refused to apologize). During the days in late July when this story first broke, one primary source of information was TheRoot.com, a Web site of multiple blogs about African American life and culture created by Gates himself (now owned by the Washington Post). Gates should never have been arrested, and the charges against him were dropped the next day, but the importance of the Internet and in particular the circulation of visual images via the Internet are why I begin with this incident. These visual cultures of the Internet, in which images are part of the information we seek online, and the emergence and immense popularity of racially themed Web sites created by, for, and about people of color, such as TheRoot.com, are the main focus of Lisa Nakamura’s latest book. For some, the text-only Internet seemed to hold the promise of an escape from embodiment, and along with it the mirage of escape from gender and racial identity; there is an oft-referenced television commercial from the Internet’s early days, in which the viewer is invited to imagine the online world as a place “where there is no gender, no race” (which Nakamura discusses in her earlier work). Yet, as Nakamura demonstrates in this volume, the Internet’s visual cultures—from Facebook to YouTube to avatars to video games—insist on visual representations of the embodied, gendered, and racialized self online.

Kathy Charmaz is the mother of grounded theory. A member of the “second generation” following Barney Glaser and the late Anselm Strauss, she has brought the approach into contemporary times and, along the way, inspired students and colleagues with publications that span a twenty-five-year period. Constructing Grounded Theory builds on her previous work and extends with unusual clarity and precision in the methodological literature the interpretive turn in grounded theory she charted in earlier methodological publications. The book will be a major resource for investigators for years to come. All readers will appreciate her concise summary of the history of grounded theory from Discovery (Glaser and Strauss 1967) to the present. She offers a respectful and balanced account of current strains and tensions between “objectivist” grounded theorists and the growing constructivist tradition, noting areas of overlap as well as points of divergence. The origins of the tension could have been anticipated given the intellectual biographies of the method’s originators, with Glaser coming from the epicenter of survey research and structural functionalism—the sociology department at Columbia University—while Strauss was oriented toward fieldwork, and Chicago school symbolic interactionism. Throughout the book there is close attention paid to both the epistemological stance of objectivists and that of constructivists. As Charmaz writes, a “constructivist would emphasize eliciting the participant’s definitions of terms, situations, and events and try to tap his or her assumptions, implicit meanings, and tacit rules. An objectivist would be concerned with obtaining information about chronology, events, settings, and behaviors” (p. 32). Since Glaser and Strauss’s original “discovery” of grounded theory, practitioners of the method have straddled both sides of the divide, and there are plenty of ambiguous statements

Stories and storytelling are not new to the social sciences. In the world of qualitative research, the use and analysis of narratives date back at least to William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1920). What has been lacking in the field is a cogent analytic framework that is at once theoretically rich and empirically sensitive. Analyzing Narrative Reality fills this role masterfully. The book challenges the journalistic impulse to see narratives as transparent and moderates the positivistic tendency to generalize stories well beyond the social context in and for which they were articulated. Instead, Analyzing Narrative Reality presents a model of narrative analysis that is sensitive to both the content and the practice of storytelling, or the whats and hows of storytelling, as the authors put it. Gubrium and Holstein’s core argument is that narrative and narration are socially embedded and ongoing practices: “Stories are assembled and told to someone, somewhere, at some time, for different purposes, and with a variety of consequences. . . . The point is that the environments of storytelling mediate the internal organization and meaning of accounts” (p. 10). And to study narratives, we must go “into the field”; indeed, the phrase is used as a chapter subheading throughout the book. Going into the field, or “narrative ethnography,” enables Gubrium and Holstein to attend to narratives in real-life situations: “Accommodating naturalistic, ethnomethodological, and conversation analytic impulses, our approach focuses on the everyday narrative activity that unfolds within situated interaction. It entails an acute awareness of myriad layers of social context that condition narrative production” (p. 24). With this broad theoretical and methodological emphasis, the authors go on to present narrative analysis in four parts. Part 1, “Narrative Reality,” sets the stage for the book, with the first two chapters reviewing alternative paradigms and rejecting them in favor of a narrative practice model. Gubrium and Holstein’s treatment of the opposition is particularly revealing of their pedagogical philosophy. They argue the merits of their own approach by offering alternative readings of other sociologists’ data.

The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers, Edited by David D. Franks and E. Doyle McCarthy