Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Recording of presentation introducing narrative analysis, outlining what it is, why it can be a useful approach, how to do it and where to find out more. Presentation given at methods@manchester seminar at University of Manchester on 4 March 2010.

What is Narrative Analysis

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307/3343529.pdf

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work

Será que a desigualdade de rendimentos aumentou durante os últimos tempos? Quem ganhou e quem perdeu neste processo? Este processo afectou todos os países da OCDE uniformemente? Em que medida é que maiores desigualdades de rendimentos são a consequência de maiores diferenças nos rendimentos dos trabalhadores e até que ponto são afectados por outros factores? Finalmente, como é que a redistribuição governamental através do sistema de benefícios fiscais afecta estas tendências?

Book Review: OECD, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries:

Purpose – This paper aims to explore how neo‐liberalism shapes income support policy and lone mothers' experiences in Canada and the USADesign/methodology/approach – A critical comparative analysis is undertaken of how Canadian and US governments take up sociological concepts of risk, market citizenship, and individualization, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the design and administration of neo‐liberal income support policies directed at lone mothers Specifically, the contradictory life circumstances that Canadian and American lone mothers experience when they access income supports that are designed ostensibly to construct/reconstruct them as citizens capable of risk taking in their search for employment and self‐sufficiency are comparedFindings – The paper finds that the realities for poor lone mothers are remarkably similar in the two countries and therefore argue that income support policies, particularly welfare‐to‐work initiatives, underpinned by neo‐liberal tenets, can act in a counter‐intu

The risks of being a lone mother on income support in Canada and the USA

Chapter 1: Introduction PART ONE: ANALYZING NARRATIVES Chapter 2: Broad Strokes Approaches to Narrative Analysis Chapter 3: Fine-Grained Analyses of Meaning Chapter 4: The Interview in Narrative Analysis PART TWO: ANALYZING TALK-IN-INTERACTION Chapter 5 : The Basics of Conversation Analysis Chapter 6: Conversation Analysis Approaches to Social Categories Chapter 7: Institutional Talk-in-Interaction Chapter 8: The Interview in Conversation Analysis PART THREE: ANALYZING DISCOURSE Chapter 9: Foucauldian Discourse Analysis Chapter 10: Critical Discourse Analysis Chapter 11: Garden-Variety Discourse Analysis Chapter 12: The Interview in Discourse Analysis Chapter 13: Conclusion

Analyzing talk in the social sciences : narrative, conversation & discourse strategies

This paper examines the political implications of methodological issues related to the now ubiquitous production of surveys dealing with issues of privacy and surveillance. It concentrates on how the distinctive attributes of a survey's response rate can skew the findings of such studies. The conclusion offers suggestions for how academics and activists might respond to this issue.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/3499/3453

The Public Politics of Opinion Research on Surveillance and Privacy

This article focuses on the durability and changeability of networks of social support to manage poverty from a life-course perspective. Drawing on interviews with members of 20 families, the authors explore networks’ origins and changes, the sources of support, and types of supports exchanged. The authors find networks to manage poverty are more likely to be in flux than durable. Intersecting transitions over life courses and shifting availability of supports from community and the welfare state require family members to be open to change in support relations. The management of poverty is multifaceted and challenged by the malleability of support networks.

Networks of Social Support to Manage Poverty: More Changeable than Durable

Drawing upon a discourse analysis of public-use policy documents and qualitative interview data, this paper explores how mothers on social assistance in three Canadian provinces balance actual or expected policy expectations of their employability (e.g., participation in welfare-to-work programming) with their caregiving responsibilities. The results suggest that mothers' experiences of a time crunch, overload, and interference varied depending on their employability status and that they often experienced work-family conflict in ways similar to that experienced by working mothers not on assistance. The policy implications of these findings are discussed. Key Words: caregiving, mothers, social assistance, welfare-to-work, work-family conflict. Since the early 1980s, the economic doctrine and political ideology of neoliberalism has garnered political and popular support for economic restructuring and redefining the Canadian welfare state in all facets of social policy (Hartman, 2005), including provincial social assistance programs. The increasing globalization of competitive markets, as well as national and provincial concerns over rising deficits or debts, or both, and growing social assistance caseloads, are factors understood to demand a neoliberal response of restructuring to minimize state interference and prioritize market individualism, including its corresponding values of self-reliance, competition, and self-sufficiency (Bakker, 1996; Brodie, 1996; O'Connor, OrlofT, & Shaver, 1999; Shaver, 2001). Much like in the other Western industrialized societies of the United States, Australia, and Britain (O'Connor et al.), the rise of a neoliberal discourse in Canada has meant that social assistance receipt is increasingly framed as a market relationship and programs are infiltrated by welfare-to-work initiatives such as education and employment training programs designed to reintegrate benefit recipients back into the market as soon as possible. This market-oriented relationship as a basis of benefit receipt has eclipsed and undermined traditional social citizenship orientations. Although expectations that benefits are temporary and that recipients must seek employment have always been embedded within Canadian social assistance policy (Lightman & Riches, 2000), this residual program originally provided individuals with a limited version of social citizenship rights (Scott, 1999)-to a "modicum of economic welfare and security"-to alleviate some of their experiences of inequality in a capitalist society (Marshall 1963, p. 74). For example, individuals' rights to assistance when in need, along with the right to be free from mandatory participation in work incentive programs were protected under the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan (CAP). With the replacement of CAP with the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) in 1995, the right to adequate assistance has disappeared in Canada. Instead, individuals' social rights are increasingly commodified in ways suggested by Esping-Anderson's (1990) classification of Canada as a liberal welfare state. Individuals' "entitlement to benefits is directly related to their capacity to sell their labour power in the market places" (Lightman & Riches, p. 180) and their "employability" efforts (e.g., mandatory participation in welfare-to-work programs) are a condition of benefit receipt (Breitkreuz, 2005; Dwyer, 2004b; Gazso, 2006a; O'Connor et al., 1999; Walter, 2002; Weigt, 2006). Indeed, increasingly restrictive and punitive policy constraints are ratcheted upward to enforce individuals' employability so that they quickly emulate values of neoliberalism and become independent, flexible, and skill-oriented individuals capable of participation in the labor market. This ratcheting upward of expectations of employability is not only unique to Canada alone but also acutely manifest in time limits on benefit receipt in the United States (Gazso, 2006a) and the "creeping conditionality" evident in the restructuring of social assistance policy in the United kingdom (Dwyer, 2004a, p. …

Balancing Expectations for Employability and Family Responsibilities While on Social Assistance: Low‐Income Mothers’ Experiences in Three Canadian Provinces*

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