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Responds to study (Shaffer et al., 1990) on adolescent suicide attempters and suicide prevention programs. Challenges study results, arguing against implications that effectiveness of all educational suicide intervention efforts are doomed and that suicide is function of mental illness rather than stresses and losses of life. Argues that death education courses of semester length may temper suicidal behaviors. (Author/NB)

The wisdom and results of the Shaffer et al. study [1] are challenged regarding: 1) program content, 2) length of student exposure, 3) instructor competence, and, particularly 4) the implicit conceptualization of suicide as simplistic rather than a complex, interpretive act. Certainly to conclude, or even to imply, that the effectiveness of all educational suicide intervention efforts are doomed, or that suicide is a function of mental illness rather than the stresses and losses experienced through living in mass society, is clearly unwarranted. The value of ongoing death education courses of semester length for the tempering of suicidal behaviors is argued.

A male hemophiliac, who had contracted AIDS through a contaminated blood product, enrolled as a senior student in an Illinois public high school. The disruptive reactions that had emerged in similar situations were averted. The 13 processes that were primarily responsible for the successful integration of the student into the school system are delineated, illustrated, documented, and interpreted. Four methods--inside participant observation, analysis of documents, interviews, and survey questionnaires--were used to investigate the situation. The findings have implications for three areas: (a) the use of multiple methods in researching large social systems, (b) the sociological understanding of 'overt ambiguous awareness contexts,' and (c) policies for the management of schoolchildren with AIDS. This study appears to be the first to intensively examine the reaction of an educational community to a student with AIDS while the reaction was actually emerging. Other studies have been retrospective.

Explores factors by which people attempt to establish identities which will be remembered beyond their lifetimes. Provides a conceptual and theoretical analysis of sports success as an auspicious arena for immortalizing oneself. (JDH)

Lifton's writings indicate that fear of nuclear holocaust has severely impaired and threatens to negate traditional modes of symbolic immortality in America. Lifton's research, however, has been limited to extreme contexts. Data were triangulated in four distinctive American contexts. Found substantial negative evidence of Lifton's suspicions in each context. (Author)

The introduction of "replacement teams" into the social world of NFL football during the 1987 strike stimulated a laminated language, a language that transformed traditional meanings by linking varying social definitions to one another. Emergent content analysis of extensive newspaper, sport magazine and newsmagazine, and live television and radio accounts was used to inductively study this language. Power, media, and social structure impacted on the various language terms that Here created. Laminated language protected, rejected, accepted, satirically extended, and integrated definitions. Various ways in which the recognition of laminated language may be used to enhance the use of Goffman's framing concepts and leads in the sociological study of everyday life are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symbolic interactionist perspective is used to demonstrate that the substantive area of sport can be conceptually elevated to a more formal level. Becker's formulation of identity as a commitment mechanism is: (1) conceptually extended to include more active, diverse, and complex lines of activity, and (2) applied to sport behavior. Sport commitment appears to be an effective tool for the recasting of sport. Directives for future investigations of: (1) sport as side bet and (2) identity as a commitment process are delineated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This naturalistic investigation of adolescents, at a treatment facility for drug use focuses on the processes through which the past is "called out" and obstructed or woven into ongoing and future contexts. The springboards of this "calling out" process are "emotional reminders" those physical, social, and internal residues of meaningful interactions that have the capacity to jog the past, nudging, sometimes propelling it into new presents and futures. Meaningful interactions include landmark life events" and "self-defining memories" involving unresolved conflicts. Sociologists have, in effect, focused more directly on emotional reminders in their pioneering consideration of collective memory but have emphasized extraordinary historical commemorative events and symbols that maintain public memory at the societal level. Although there are excellent accounts, of the dynamics of public memory, the more common triggers and related pasts that ordinary persons encounter in interpersonal and everyday contexts have been virtually ignored by sociologists.

The naturalistic and comparative investigation focuses on a problematic enacted emotion, the emotional reaction to a student with AIDS, generated within a private school and a public school involved in controversies regarding the retention and the enrollment, respectively, of the student, Jeff. This article confirms that emotion must be studied social psychologically because fear became anchored within individuals, social acts, and the community and media structures. Emotion, certainly, was not simply a psychological phenomenon and could not be viewed apart from the actions, the others, and the social situations in which it became intertwined. It is often stressed that emotions, in one way or another, significantly draw on existing physiological, interactional, or structural states. Hochschild explained how female airline hostesses are required to manage their feelings to fit current stratification hierarchies. Durkheim argued that emotions were a reality that came before the person. Such views are paramount for the understanding and explanation of regularized emotional patterns but are less useful in situations where there is not a "natural attitude of emotionality."

The article presents the author's views on postmodernist society. The author focuses his views around the interpretations of the philosopher Norman K. Denzin. The author says that the postmodern view of obdurate reality can be clarified, tempered, or changed. It should enhance its general acceptance and, consequently, its usefulness. The author further says that human beings create their own world. This world is the product of the symbolic interaction, individuals, or, for that matter, interactions or relationships to encounter. The goal of the typical ethnographer has always been to understand a socially constructed reality in all of its complexity. Socially constructed reality has an obdurate quality, fundamentally, because it occurs. Post modernists have given more emphasis to ethical problems in a society. It has also been shown that postmodernists need to base their refutation of obdurate reality on intelligently constructed validation studies conducted within the same time frame as the initial representation.

AIDS provides a rare occasion for the sociological study of emotions. First, fears generated by AIDS involve many metaphors, including fear of the unknown or mysterious; fear of infection or contagion; fear of death; homophobia (fear of homosexuals); and aversion to drug users and their place in society. Second, AIDS offers an opportunity to scrutinize deep, negative emotions in everyday contexts and to examine, particularly, how the primary emotion of fear is played out in society. AIDS has been assigned the nickname, AFRAIDS (Acute Fear Regarding AIDS), by some groups. These fears have generated a range of public policy suggestions that detached observers regard as radical and extreme. Third, AIDS has had a brief but volatile history. Consequently, the fears of AIDS can be considered temporally and historically as they have moved from homosexual communities to middle-class American schools, hospices, and volunteer bloodbanks, Carpenter, and Magarigal. Fourth, since AIDS has been the focus of considerable scientific, local, and political discussion, it is possible to study the interplay between emotion and cognition in meaningful social dramas. Fifth, AIDS provides an opportunity to examine the views of many sociologists regarding the impact of rationalism on emotionality in the modern world.

This paper offers a descriptive-phenomenological-interpretation of the mortuary ritual of an ordinary American. The bereaved experienced this structure. A symbolic interactional version of structure is generated through naturalistic observations of the mortuary ritual of an ordinary person. The mortuary ritual is traced from death through the 18 months following the ritual. Mesostructure emerges as a complicated version of sociologist G.H. Mead's social act and accounts for a "duality of structure." The bereavement frame is joined to normal doings through the bereavement act. The essence of living structure resided in the merging, decoupling, sequestering, and the continuation of different versions of reality. Furthermore, insights regarding the grief process are embedded in the insiders' accounts. The methodology of inside participant observation is elaborated and a strategy for evaluating ethnographic documents is detailed in the article. The fundamental ideas and concepts of interpretive interactionism, particularly Mead's social act and sociologist D.R. Maines' mesostructure, revealed the processes through which the public world of bereavement was joined to the private grief of the survivors. The bereavement act that the author observed and experienced as an insider, was a complete act. It matters not how other deaths are experienced.

This article focuses on a descriptive-phenomenological-interpretive study of media accounts which was conducted to assess the importance of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's controversial and emotional trip to Bitburg. The visit was an emotional reminder of the Holocaust for insiders and an opening to the stream of experience engulfing the Holocaust for outsiders. Insiders' and outsiders' interpretations and understandings of the visit differed in significant ways. The emergent debate revived, preserved, shared, and recast the meaning of the Holocaust. Emotional reminders called out feelings and emotion memories. Many American Jews and World War II veterans had deep feelings regarding the sacredness of the memory of evil. Meaning was shared through various entrance modes to the Holocaust. Recasting occurred through the language of change: emotional accounts and the dramaturgy of form. Implications of the Holocaust for the vulnerability of experience, the political act, status passage junctures, emotionality, living collective memory, pragmatism, and social phenomenological inquiry are discussed.

This article focuses on breast as emotional reminders. Gregory P. Stone, a sociologist, contended that interactionism suffers from a discursive bias and that appearance should be given equal attention. Stone's work provides a distinctive, detailed, and systemic conceptualization of appearance, links identity to self through the joint act, and is recognized as a classic, but, paradoxically, his views have not been examined empirically and they have not had much impact on interactionism. The author says that his evaluation of Stone's ideas is based on a secondary analysis of a number of in-depth interviews conducted by scholars Daphna Ayalah and Isaac J. Weinstock with selected women in America regarding the meaning they attributed to their breasts. Before detailing their methodology and his interpretation of their data, however, several topics are considered. First, Stone's conceptualization of appearance is explained. Second and third, the nature of sexuality in contemporary Western societies and its effects on the impoverished selves of females are discussed. The meanings the women interviewed by Ayalah and Weinstock had of their bodies cannot be understood apart from the historical context in which they lived.

Throughout history people have attributed mental illness to numerous factors, including demons, deities, heredity. lesions in the brain, witchcraft, prejudices, and environmental factors. Professional and lay perspectives have coincided in some instances. The current sociological literature seems to dichotomize etiology in the mental illness area between the medical and the societal reaction perspective. The experienced lay persons in this study had a broader and more varied complex of reasons for the etiology of mental illness. Twenty deinstitutionalized mentally ill patients and certain of their significant others were the main subjects of the research. Two years of field work and intensive interviewing were the major data-gathering procedures. Participant observation allowed the researchers to go directly to the empirical world to attempt to understand the participants' viewpoints in an inductive manner, as dictated by symbolic interaction. The female author assumed the role of an overt participant observer and attended a day treatment center for the mentally ill three days a week for an average of five hours per day. The observer's purpose was to develop rapport with the staff and clients and to observe the clients' interactions at the center. Clients were also accompanied on trips to the community and visited at their homes, their relatives' homes, and the observer's home.

This article describes the experiences of the initial black to pledge a white fraternity at one American college campus during the explosive decade of the sixties. The study also provides 12 grounded directives for future investigations of the interracial act. The black pledge was 18 years of age, an urbanite, a second semester freshman, and athletically built. A naturalistic mode of inquiry was used, which generated a range of detail insights, and comparative materials about on-going events that would not have been possible with traditional methods. The major conclusion was that the interracial act is a transformation. Since the interracial act is, at base, a social act, it is peculiarly amenable to study through the symbolic interactional perspective. The research act in the context of this paper is the process whereby the naturalistic mode of inquiry is blended with the interracial act. The research act can, and should be, evaluated in both absolute and relative terms. Evaluations of the research act will help the investigator delimit the strengths and weaknesses of his or her research and provide an evaluative baseline for other investigators.

This article presents a strategy for researching organizational environments. A strategy for studying organizations as process systems that requires additional attention is to approach the organization through the passages of its members. Individuals experience multiple passages during their lives. Some of these, passages are bound to organizations, such as bureaucracies and mental institutions, and are frequently labeled careers. Others, such as aging and marriage, are not so intimately tied to entities deemed organizational by sociologists, and are more commonly called status passages. Organizational or nonorganizational, however, passages involve both an "objective" and a "subjective" component. Some sociologists are urging innovation in organizational analysis, emphasizing that the role of individuals and interaction in organizations must be given more emphasis. The organization and its environment can both be conceptualized in terms of the passages of its members. The analytical separation of the organization from its environment is not an easy matter, and an arbitrary element may always be involved.

Presents letters to the editor related to the language of sociology. Benefits of the awareness of critical sociology; Criticism of the book "The Reference Other Orientation: An Extension of the Reference Group Concept in Contemporary Sociology"; Problems of contradiction in sociological theorizing.

In this article the authors examine the apparently contradictory concepts of "pet" and "family member" in an attempt to understand how these become translated into a consistent, sensible meaning Employing concepts from frame analysis, they illustrate how the meaning of pets is built up and maintained by framing and keying Although ostensibly about family pets, the analysis is also significant because it provides one model for applying frame analysis to concrete social situations [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is concerned with the implications of Hagan's negative assessment of the contributions of symbolic interactionism to the study of deviance. The logic of evaluating selected seminal works without reference to recent contributions of the symbolic interactionists in deviance and other areas is challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on specific methods that were used in a longitudinal Study in which 94% of the subjects cooperated at the time or at recontact after a two-year interval The probable factors responsible for this success are described, including details regarding the preparation prior to the study, approaching the subject, establishing rapport at initial contact, and the maintenance of rapport throughout the study. It is hoped this description will encourage others to provide similar reports on their methods and be helpful to those pursuing comparable research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the content analysis of newspaper political advertisements to examine selected aspects of the voting studies of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. Need to determine the attitudes of the media creators and viewers; Representation of the resource for theoretical verification and creativity within political sociology; Focus on political party identification, candidate appeal and issue orientation.

This article discusses the author Raymond L. Schmitt's observations from a social informal group, which supports sociologist George C. Homans hypotheses. Homans' two significant hypotheses concerning the existence of direct relationships between rank and the tendency to originate interaction, and rank and conformity to the group norms were upheld by Schmitt's observations. Schmit's first elaboration concerns Homans' hypothesized direct relationship between rank and range of interactions. His second elaboration involves the relationship of the subgroup to the total group. The author, Schmit observed the activities of an informal group of three men. They had worked with one another at one time on the same job. Although they were now working at different locations, they still interacted with one another outside of working hours. The author established that the group possessed a leadership structure. Interestingly, the leader had completely dominated the situation when he was present.