Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

biographical perspectives on the event as well as depicting its intersubjective, consensual meanings.

The auto-ethnography stimulates attention to writing as a way of knowing, which is an issue widely discussed in the last decade among narrative scholars. Richardson (1994) discusses an array of issues pertaining to writing as inquiry, and then provides a detailed autobiographical account of how context affects writing (Richardson 1997). Her account includes her family, academic departments, networks of colleagues, and students, and shows how her relationships and experiences with these people were part and parcel of how and what she wrote as a professional sociologist. Her writing, she shows, was intimately tied to constructions of knowledge.

While Richardson and others illustrate what Polkinghorne (1988) has termed ‘‘narrative knowing’’ Diane Bjorklund (1998) treats autobiographies as sociological subject matter. She analyzed a sample of the 11,000 American autobiographies written from 1800 to 1980 to provide a historical analysis of representations of the self. She shows how social conventions and vocabularies for describing oneself have changed through four discernible eras of American history. By taking autobiographies seriously, this analysis powerfully locates the ‘‘texts’’ of personhood in cultural and social structural contexts.

Scholars working in the area of life history research accept that all social science data are made up of human interpretations and that nearly all such data are reconstructions or representations of past events and experiences. Because of its development of techniques for gathering, coding, and analyzing explicitly reconstructive data, the life history approach is suitable for studying not only the subjective phases of social life but the historical and structural aspects as well. It can be used for a wide variety of topics and purposes, ranging from research on the trajectories of personal biographies to organizational functioning to migration patterns. It invariably leads to development of theories emphasizing social processes. Recent scholarship on narrative has shown three dominant and related trends. The first, which represents an extension of the life history research of the 1920s, pertains to the linking of collective and personal narratives. The second, a departure from the earlier work, recognizes scholars as active

narrators themselves and thus creators of narrative knowing. The third trend is the broad appeal of this area of work. It is found in all disciplines of the human sciences, it uses a wide variety of theoretical approaches, and it incorporates the array of analytical methods typical of sociological work found among American and European scholars.

(SEE ALSO: Case Studies; Qualitative Methods)

REFERENCES

Abbott, Andrew 1992 ‘‘From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism.’’ Sociological Methods and Research 20:428–455.

Angrosino, Michael 1995 ‘‘Metaphors of Ethnic Identity: Projective Life History Narratives of Trinidadians of Indian Descent.’’ Journal of Narrative and Life History 5:125–146.

Atkinson, Robert 1998 The Life Story Interview. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Berger, Ronald 1995 ‘‘Agency, Structure, and Jewish Survival of the Holocaust: A Life History Study.’’

Sociological Quarterly 36:15–36.

Bertaux, Daniel 1990 ‘‘Oral History Approaches to an International Social Movement.’’ In Else Oyen, ed.,

Comparative Methodology: Theory and Practice in International Social Research. London: Sage.

———, ed. 1981 Biography and Society: The Life-History Approach in the Social Sciences. London: Sage.

———, and Martin Kohli 1984 ‘‘The Life-Story Approach: A Continental View.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 10:149–167.

Bjorklund, Diane 1998 Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blumer, Herbert 1939 An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s ‘‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.’’ New York: Social Science Research Council.

Bochner, Arthur, and Carolyn Ellis 1992 ‘‘Personal Narrative as an Approach to Interpersonal Communication.’’ Communication Theory 2:165–172.

Bulmer, Martin 1984 The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Denzin, Norman 1989a Interpretive Biography. Newbury

Park, Calif.: Sage.

——— 1989b The Research Act. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Dolby-Stahl, Sandra 1989 Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Eheart, Brenda Krause, and Martha Bauman Power 1995 ‘‘Adoption: Understanding the Past Present, and Future through Stories.’’ Sociological Quarterly 36:197–216.

Ezzy, Douglas 1998 ‘‘Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneutics.’’ Sociological Quarterly 39:239–252.

Fisher, Walter 1987 Human Communication as Narrative. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Gephart, Robert 1988 Ethnostatistics: Qualitative Foundations for Quantitative Research. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Gotham, Kevin Fox, and William Staples 1996 ‘‘Narrative Analysis and the New Historical Sociology.’’

Sociological Quarterly 37:481–501.

Gottschalk, Louis, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Robert Angell 1945 The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology, and Sociology. New York: Social Science Research Council.

Griffin, Larry 1993 ‘‘Narrative, Event Structure, and Causal interpretation in Historical Sociology.’’ American Journal of Sociology 98:403–427.

Gubrium, Jaber 1993 Speaking of Life: Horizons of Meaning for Nursing Home Residents. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter.

Holstein, James, and Jaber Gubrium 1995 The Active Interview. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Jones, Gareth 1983 ‘‘Life History Methodology.’’ In Gareth Morgan, ed., Beyond Method: Strategies for Social Research. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.

Lieblich, Amia, Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, and Tamar Zilber 1998 Narrative Research. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage

McCall, Michal, and Judith Wittner 1990 ‘‘The Good News about Life History.’’ In Howard S. Becker and Michal McCall, eds., Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McMahan, Eva, and Kim Lacy Rogers 1994 Interactive

Oral History Interviewing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence

Erlbaum.

Mahoney, James 1999 ‘‘Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in Macrocausal Analysis.’’ American Journal of Sociology 104:1154–1196.

Maines, David 1993 ‘‘Narrative’s Moment and Sociology’s Phenomena: Toward a Narrative Sociology.’’

Sociological Quarterly 34:17–38.

——— 1999 ‘‘Information Pools and Racialized Narrative Structures.’’ Sociological Quarterly 40:317–326.

———, and Jeffery Bridger 1992 ‘‘Narrative, Community, and Land Use Decisions.’’ Social Science Journal 29:363–380

Mishler, Elliot 1995 ‘‘Models of Narrative Analysis: A Typology.’’ Journal of Narrative and Life History

5:87–124.

Orbuch, Terri 1997 ‘‘People’s Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts.’’ Annual Review of Sociology

23:455–478.

Plummer, Ken 1983 Documents of Life. London: Allen

and Unwin.

——— 1995 Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds. London: Routledge

Polkinghorne, Donald 1988 Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Randall, William Lowell 1999 ‘‘Narrative Intelligence and the Novelty of Our Lives.’’ Journal of Aging Studies 13:11–28.

Reed, John Sheldon 1989 ‘‘On Narrative and Sociology.’’ Social Forces 68:1–14.

Richardson, Laurel 1990 ‘‘Narrative and Sociology.’’

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19:116–135.

———1994 ‘‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry.’’ In Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

———1997 Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Riemann, Gerhard, and Fritz Schütze 1991 ‘‘Trajectory as a Basic Theoretical Concept for Analyzing Suffering and Disorderly Social Processes.’’ In David R. Maines, ed., Social Organization and Social Processes: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter.

Roth, Paul 1987 Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Schütze, Fritz 1983 ‘‘Biographieforschung und narratives Interview.’’ Neue Praxis 3:283–293.

Schwartz, Barry 1996 ‘‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II.’’ American Sociological Review 61:908–927.

——— 1997 ‘‘Collective Memory and History: How Abraham Lincoln Became a Symbol of Racial Equality.’’ Sociological Quarterly 38:469–496.

Smith, Louis 1994 ‘‘Biographical Method.’’ In Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Sperber, Dan 1985 On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

TenHouten, Warren 1999 ‘‘Text and Temporality: Pat- terned-Cyclical and Ordinary-Linear Forms of TimeConsciousness, Inferred from a Corpus of Australian

Aboriginal and Euro-Australian Life-Historical Interviews.’’ Symbolic Interaction 22:121–137.

Thomas, W. I., and Florian Znaniecki 1918–1920 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wertsch, James, and Kevin O’Conner 1994 ‘‘Multivoicedness in Historical Representation: American College Students’ Accounts of the Origin of the United States.’’ Journal of Narrative and Life History

4:295–309.

DAVID R. MAINES

LIFE TABLES

See Demography; Life Expectancy.

LIFESTYLES AND HEALTH

Lifestyles are a major determinant of who shall live and who shall die (Fuchs 1974; McKinlay and Marceau 1999). Mechanic (1978, p. 164) argues that the concept of lifestyles refers to a diverse set of variables, including nutrition, housing, health attitudes and beliefs, risk-taking behavior, health behavior and habits, and preventive health behavior.

CONFIRMING THE LINK BETWEEN LIFESTYLES AND HEALTH

Establishing the causal linkage between lifestyles and health is not a simple task. Variables included in lifestyles interact with each other (Mechanic 1978), making it difficult to adjust for confounding variables such as race and ethnicity, gender, social class, and psychological distress.

In addition, there are problems in specifying the nature of the etiological relationship between lifestyles and disease. Not every person who engages in an unhealthy lifestyle will die prematurely. For example, some heavy smokers do not develop lung cancer. Genetic predisposition, comorbidities, other health habits, and access to adequate medical care are factors that may intervene in the relationship between host and disease. For certain conditions, it may be complicated to determine the precise role of risky lifestyle behaviors in the development of disease.

The most convincing models of the relationship between lifestyles and health are those built on triangulated evidence from animal, clinical, and epidemiological studies. As an example, consider the link between tobacco use and cancer. In controlled randomized trials using animal subjects that are genetically the same, the experimental group of animals is exposed to tobacco smoke while the control group is not. If the experimental group has a higher incidence of cancer than the control group, the study provides evidence to link tobacco smoke to cancer. Another strategy to link lifestyle behavior to health involves clinical studies with human subjects. Lung tissue of smokers is compared with lung tissue of nonsmokers. If more smokers than nonsmokers have cancerous cells in the lung tissue, this provides additional data to confirm that smoking causes lung cancer. A final strategy uses epidemiological methods. In prospective studies, separate groups of smokers and nonsmokers are followed over time to ascertain the risk of developing cancer within each group. All else being equal, if smokers develop more cases of cancer, the causal relationship between smoking and cancer is confirmed.

With these methodological issues in mind, four selected behaviors are used below to illustrate how lifestyles impact on health: tobacco use, alcohol consumption, diet, and sexual behavior and injection-related practices that increase the risk of acquiring the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). For each behavior, extensive animal, clinical, and epidemiological data exist to support the causal relationship between each agent and disease. Gender differences in these behaviors are used to illustrate how lifestyles vary across social groups. Men are more likely to engage in these risky behaviors compared to women; this helps explain why women live longer than men do (Crose 1997). Finally, examples of successful efforts to change risky life-style behaviors are provided.

TOBACCO USE

Tobacco use has been defined as the most important single preventable cause of death and disease in society. Smoking causes an average of 430,700 deaths per year in the United States. One in every five deaths is smoking related (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997a).

Careful epidemiological studies have determined that tobacco use increases the risks for heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema, and other lung diseases. Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk for premature births, complications of pregnancy, low-birthweight infants, stillbirths, and infant mortality. Fetuses exposed to smoke in utero and young infants exposed to secondhand smoke are at increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome, poor lung development, asthma, and respiratory infections (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997b; Environmental Protection Agency 1992; Floyd et al. 1993). Secondhand smoke is also associated with adult illnesses (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997a). Increased risks for lung cancer and heart disease are reported for nonsmokers who live with smokers.

Age-adjusted rates indicate that 27 percent of men smoked in 1995, compared to 23 percent of women (National Center for Health Statistics 1998). The gender gap used to be wider. In 1965, men were 1.5 times more likely to smoke than women were. Today, the gender difference is only 17 percent. The decline in cigarette smoking has been greater among men. While the prevalence of smoking among men dropped by almost half from 1965 to 1995, the rate for women dropped by only one-third. Traditionally, smoking by women was not condoned, but over time these attitudes have changed. As a result, the smoking rates for men and women are nearly the same. This translates into a 400 percent increase in deaths from lung cancer among women between 1960 and 1990 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997a).

Various prevention efforts have reduced the prevalence of smoking in the United States. Smokefree workplaces are the norm rather than the exception. Warning labels appear on cigarette packages, and billboards advertising cigarettes are banned. Community-based public education campaigns and worksite programs have been successful in smoking reduction (COMMIT Research Group 1995).

ALCOHOL

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA 1997) estimates that alcohol use is

responsible for 100,000 deaths in year in this country. About 44 percent of the motor vehicle fatalities in 1994 were alcohol related (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 1994). Alcohol use is frequently implicated in accidental injuries and deaths from falls, drowning, interpersonal and family violence, occupational hazards, and fires (NIAAA 1997).

From 10 to 20 percent of heavy drinkers develop cirrhosis of the liver, which was the tenth leading cause of death in the United States in 1996 (DeBakey et al. 1995; National Center for Health Statistics 1998). The liver is the primary site of alcohol metabolism, and drinkers are at risk for other forms of liver disease, including alcoholic hepatitis and cancer.

Heavy alcohol use causes loss in heart muscle contractile function, arrhythmias, degenerative disease of the heart muscle, and heart enlargement, and also increases the risk for hypertension and stroke. Alcohol is implicated in esophageal, breast, and colorectal cancer, and it may increase the risk for other types of cancer as well. NIAAA concludes, ‘‘The range of medical consequences of alcohol abuse is both immense and complex— virtually no part of the body is spared the effects of excessive alcohol consumption’’ (1990, p. 127).

Alcohol also functions as a teratogen, producing defects in the human fetus in utero. The possible effects of alcohol on the fetus include gross morphological defects as well as cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions. Alcohol ingestion during pregnancy causes a variety of birth defects, including fetal alcohol syndrome, alcoholrelated birth defects, and alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the most severe consequence of the mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy and is characterized by craniofacial anomalies, mental retardation, central nervous system dysfunction, and growth retardation. Fetal alcohol syndrome is one of the leading causes of preventable birth defects (Stratton et al. 1996).

Men are more likely to drink alcohol than women are. Twenty-two percent of men are lifetime abstainers from alcohol, versus 45 percent of women. About 56 percent of men are current drinkers, compared to 34 percent of women. Heavy drinking is gender related. Almost 12 percent of

men average more than fourteen alcoholic drinks per week, compared to less than 4 percent of women (NIAAA 1998).

Various prevention efforts are directed toward decreasing alcohol consumption. The alcohol beverage warning label, implemented in 1989, warns drinkers about birth defects, drunk driving, operating machinery, and health problems; however, its impact has been modest. Other alcohol prevention programs have been implemented, including dram shop liability (servers are legally responsible for damage or injury caused by drunk patrons), training servers of alcohol to avoid selling to intoxicated persons and to minors, lowering the allowable blood alcohol concentration levels for drivers, changing the availability of alcohol, enforcing impaired driving laws, and designating one person in a car as the nondrinking driver. These community intervention programs have reduced alcohol-related traffic deaths significantly (NIAAA 1997).

DIET

Dietary factors have been linked to mortality from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) and cancer; these diseases are the leading causes of death in the United States. Diet affects four of the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease: hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Obesity, as well as diets high in saturated fats, trans fatty acids, and cholesterol, raise blood cholesterol concentration and blood pressure, thus increasing the risk for coronary heart disease and stroke. Diets low in saturated fats but high in fiber and some omega-3 fatty acids (found in walnuts, certain oils [fish, canola, soybean], and green leafy vegetables) lower the risk for heart disease (Hu et al. 1997; Ascherio et al. 1996).

Diet also affects cancer risk. While the link between dietary intake and breast cancer is controversial, there is evidence that a diet high in saturated fat plays an etiological role (Kolonel 1997; Hankin 1993). High fat intake increases the risk for prostate cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer (Kolonel 1997). On the other hand, diets high in fruits, vegetables, and fiber lower the probability of developing various types of cancer, including breast, colorectal, stomach, and lung (Ziegler 1991; Hankin 1993).

Gender differences in diet and obesity exist. For example, women are more likely to be overweight compared to men (39 percent versus 36 percent). Among the poor, the gender gap is larger: 46 percent of poor women versus 31 percent of poor men suffer from obesity (National Center for Health Statistics 1998). Despite this increased risk for obesity, women consume healthier food than men do. While men consume more meat, saturated fat, and high-calorie foods, women eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lower-calorie foods (Crose 1997). Successful programs have been developed to encourage healthier eating habits for men and women, including interventions in worksites and families (Sorensen et al. 1999). The public has responded to these efforts, as evidenced by a 4 percent drop in blood cholesterol levels from 1978 to 1990 (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute 1996).

SEXUAL AND INJECTION-RELATED

PRACTICES

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the eighth leading cause of death in the United States in 1996 (Peters et al. 1998). HIV is transmitted through blood products, bodily fluids, and breast milk. Transmission of HIV can be prevented by the use of safe sexual practices and sterile needles.

There are clear gender differences in the way AIDS is contracted, and the infection rate among women has been rising. Forty-eight percent of AIDS patients acquire the disease through male homosexual contact. Another 10 percent of AIDS cases appear in men who have sexual relations with a male or female partner and also use intravenous drugs. Almost 26 percent become ill solely through infected needles, and 6 percent through heterosexual contact that was not related to intravenous drug use. Among women, the most common route of infection is intravenous drug use (by herself or her partner), 60 percent or unprotected sex with an infected partner, 22 percent (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1998a).

While some HIV prevention programs promote abstention from sex and cessation of drug injecting, most programs define harm reduction

as the goal (Kelly 1999). This policy promotes using condoms correctly on a consistent basis, having sex with uninfected partners, and cleaning needles with bleach or exchanging contaminated syringes for sterile ones.

Programs designed to decrease (1) the rate of unprotected anal sex among men who have sex with men and (2) the proportion of men having unprotected sex with multiple male partners contributed to the reduction in AIDS cases among homosexuals during the 1980s and early 1990s. However, 1997 data suggest that unprotected anal sex among gay men and unprotected sex with multiple partners is increasing, especially among younger gay men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1999).

The second major mode of HIV transmission, especially among women, is by infected needles. Syringe exchange programs or the use of bleach to clean syringes prevent the spread of HIV among injecting-drug users. The number of syringe exchange programs has grown rapidly; 17.5 million needles were exchanged in 100 programs in 1997 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1998b). Other communities have distributed bleach kits that reduce the spread of HIV (CDC AIDS Community Demonstration Projects Research Group 1999).

DISCUSSION

Four examples were selected to illustrate the role of lifestyles and health. There are other lifestyles that are related to health, which are beyond the scope of this article. For example, stressful lifestyles have been linked to mental illness, gastrointestinal illness, and heart disease. Regular use of seatbelts reduces the likelihood of death or injury in automobile accidents. Proper dental hygiene decreases the rate of dental caries. Childhood immunizations prevent measles, mumps, and polio.

When discussing lifestyles and health, several unresolved issues remain. First, the role of lifestyles in health is still evolving. As Becker (1993) argues, what is said to be bad for us one day may be determined to be good for us the next (and vice versa). For example, while researchers have documented the deleterious effects of alcohol on health, there is some recent evidence that red wine consumption may lower cholesterol levels (NIAAA 1997).

Second, there is continuing debate about the pros and cons of changing an individual’s lifestyle versus changing the social milieu (Kelly 1999). Should we invest in programs designed to encourage an individual to stop smoking? Is it better to develop strategies that change societal norms about the acceptability of smoking? Should we do both?

Third, policy makers note that healthy lifestyle programs must be tailored to the individual, the subgroup (gender, age, race or ethnicity, and social class) and the particular community at risk (Kelly 1999). Thus, designing successful interventions to alter lifestyles is challenging.

Finally, it must be emphasized that that while a healthy lifestyle may be a necessary condition for longevity; it is not a sufficient condition. Many variables interact with lifestyles to protect against disease and death. For example, evidence is mounting that genetic predispositions are very important in the etiology of certain diseases. Thus, the models predicting who shall live and who shall die involve complicated interactions of lifestyles, preventive health behavior, genetic risk, sociodemographic characteristics, and so on. Nonetheless, individuals who abstain from smoking and injecting drugs, drink alcohol in moderation, reduce the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol, and use safe sex practices have a better chance of survival than those who eat and drink excessively and do not follow recommended safe sex practices.

REFERENCES

Ascherio, Alberto, Eric B. Rimm, Edward L. Giovannuccci, Donna Spiegelman, Meir Stampfer, and Walter C. Willett 1996 ‘‘Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Men: Cohort Follow Up Study in the United States.’’ British Medical Journal 313:84–90.

Becker, Marshall 1993 ‘‘A Medical Sociologist Looks at Health Promotion.’’ Journal of Health and Social Behavior 34:1–6.

Centers for Disease Control AIDS Community Demonstration Projects Research Group 1999. ‘‘Communi- ty-Level HIV Intervention in 5 Cities: Final Outcome Data from Demonstration Projects.’’ American Journal of Public Health 89:336–345.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1997a Facts about Cigarette Mortality. Atlanta, Ga.: CDC, May 23.

——— 1997b Fact Sheet, Smoking and Pregnancy, Atlanta, Ga.: CDC, November 7.

———1998a HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, No. 10. Atlanta, Ga.: CDC.

———1998b ‘‘Update: Syringe Exchange Programs— United States, 1997.’’ Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 47:652–655.

———1999 ‘‘Increases in Unsafe Sex and Rectal Gonorrhea among Men Who Have Sex with Men—San Francisco, California, 1994–1997.’’ Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 48:45–48.

COMMIT Research Group 1995 ‘‘Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation (COMMIT): I. Cohort Results from a Four Year Community Intervention.’’ American Journal of Public Health 85:183–192.

Crose, Royda 1997 Why Women Live Longer than Men . . .

and What Men Can Learn from Them. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

DeBakey, S. F., F. S. Stinson, B. F. Grant, and M. C. Dufour 1995 Liver Cirrhosis Mortality in the US 1970– 1992, Surveillance Report No. 37. Rockville, Md.: NIAAA Division of Biometry and Epidemiology.

Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research

and Development 1992 Respiratory Health Effects of

Passive Smoking, EPA/600/6-90/006F. Washington,

D.C.: EPA.

Floyd, R. L., B. K. Rimer, G. A. Giovano, P. D. Mullen, and S. E. Sullivan 1993 ‘‘A Review of Smoking in Pregnancy: Effects on Pregnancy Outcomes and Cessation Efforts.’’ Annual Review of Public Health

14:379–411.

Fuchs, Victor 1974 Who Shall Live? Health Economics and Social Change. New York: Basic Books.

Hankin, Jean H. 1993 ‘‘Role of Nutrition in Women’s Health: Diet and Breast Cancer.’’ Journal of the American Dietetic Association 93:994–999.

Hu, Frank B., Meir J. Stampfer, JoAnn E. Manson, Eric Rimm, Graham A. Colditz, Bernard A. Rosner, Charles H. Hennekens, and Walter C. Willett 1997 ‘‘Dietary Fat Intake and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women.’’ New England Journal of Medicine

337:1491–1499.

Kelly, Jeffrey A. 1999 ‘‘Community-Level Interventions Are Needed to Prevent New HIV Infections.’’ American Journal of Public Health 89:299–301.

Kolonel, Laurence N. 1997 ‘‘Fat and Cancer: The Epidemiologic Evidence in Perspective.’’ Pp. 1–19 in American Institute for Cancer Research, ed., Dietary Fat and Cancer. New York: Plenum.

McKinlay, John B., and Lisa D. Marceau 1999 ‘‘A Tale of 3 Tails.’’ American Journal of Public Health 89:295–298.

Mechanic, David 1978 Medical Sociology, 2nd ed. New York: Free Press.

National Center for Health Statistics 1998 Health, United States, 1998 with Socioeconomic Status and Health, DHHS Pub. No. 98-1232. Hyattsville, Md.: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute 1996 Facts about Blood Cholesterol, NIH Pub. No. 94-2696. Bethesda, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

National Highway Safety Administration 1994 Traffic Safety Facts 1994: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatal Accident Reporting System and the General Estimates System. DOT HS 808 169. Washington, D.C.: Department of Transportation National Center for Statistics and Analysis.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism 1990 Seventh Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health, DHHS Pub. No. (ADM) 90-1656. Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

———1997 Ninth Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health. DHHS Pub. No. (ADM) 97-4017. Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

———1998 Drinking in the United States: Main Findings from the 1992 National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey. DHHS Pub. No. 99-3519. Bethesda, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Peters, Kimberley D., Kenneth D. Kochanek, and Sherry L. Murphy 1998 Deaths: Final Data for 1996; National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 47, no. 9. Atlanta, Ga.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics.

Sorensen, Glorian, Anne Stoddard, Karen Peterson, Nancy Cohen, Mary Kay Hunt, Evelyn Stein, Ruth Palombo, and Ruth Lederson 1999 ‘‘Increasing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption through Worksites and Families in the Treatwell 5-A-Day Study.’’ American Journal of Public Health 89:54–60.

Stratton, Kathleen, Cynthia Howe, and Frederick Battaglia, eds. 1996 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: Diagnosis, Epidemiology, Prevention, and Treatment. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Ziegler, Regina G. 1991 ‘‘Vegetables, Fruit, and Carotenoids and the Risk of Cancer.’’ American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 53:251S–295S.

JANET HANKIN

LINGUISTICS

See Sociolinguistics.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

Interest in the relationship between literature and society is hardly a new phenomenon. We still read and refer to the ancient Greeks in this regard. In The Republic, for example, Plato presages both Mme. de Staël’s treatise of 1800, which was the first to discuss cross-national differences in literature, and later notions of literary reflection with his idea of imitation. What is new, however, is the relative legitimacy of the study of literature within the discipline of sociology. This is due both to the increasing interest in culture in sociology after years of marginalization (Calhoun 1989) and to the increasing influence of cultural studies on sociology and throughout the academy.

A broader interest in and acceptance of cultural sociology has meant that the types of research questions and methods common to sociological studies of literature are now more widely accepted within the field. Sociology has extended its methodological boundaries in response to both attacks on the dominance of positivism and the rising power of alternative stances suggested by postmodernism. At the same time, changes in the goals, and sometimes the methods, of studying literature sociologically have moved the area closer to what is still the mainstream of the discipline. Thus the sociology of literature has benefited from a twofold movement in which (1) sociology as a discipline has become more interested in and accepting of research questions pertaining to meaning (cf. Wuthnow 1987, however, for a particularly strong attack on meaning from within the culture camp) and employing qualitative methods; and (2) the sociology of literature has evolved in the direction of more mainstream sociological areas through the merging of quantitative with qualitative methods and of empirical with hermeneutic research questions.

TRADITIONAL APPROACHES

As recently as 1993, Wendy Griswold maintained that the sociology of literature was a ‘‘nonfield’’ and ‘‘like an amoeba . . . lack[ing] firm structure’’ (1993, p. 455). Certainly the sociology of literature has been a marginal area in the discipline of sociology. As such, it has generally failed to attract the kind of career-long commitments common to

more central areas of the discipline. Many scholars writing on the sociology of literature see the area as a sideline and produce only a single book or article on the subject. This has exacerbated the lack of structure in the development of the field. Even so, it is surprising just how much sociological research has been done on literature and on literature’s relationship to social patterns and processes.

Reflection Theory. Traditionally, the central perspective for sociologists studying literature has been the use of literature as information about society. To a much lesser degree, traditional work has focused on the effect of literature in shaping and creating social action. The former approach, the idea that literature can be ‘‘read’’ as information about social behavior and values, is generally referred to as reflection theory. Literary texts have been variously described as reflecting the ‘‘economics, family relationships, climate and landscapes, attitudes, morals, races, social classes, political events, wars, [and] religion’’ of the society that produced the texts (Albrecht 1954, p. 426). Most people are familiar with an at least implicit reflection perspective from journalistic social commentary. For instance, when Time magazine put the star of the television show Ally McBeal on its cover, asking ‘‘Is Feminism Dead?’’ (1998), it assumed that a television show could be read as information on Americans’ values and understanding of feminism.

Unfortunately, ‘‘reflection’’ is a metaphor, not a theory. The basic idea behind reflection, that the social context of a cultural work affects the cultural work, is obvious and fundamental to a sociological study of literature. But the metaphor of reflection is misleading. Reflection assumes a simple mimetic theory of literature in which literary works transparently and unproblematically document the social world for the reader. In fact, however, literature is a construct of language; its experience is symbolic and mediating rather than direct. Literary realism in particular ‘‘effaces its own status as a sign’’ (Eagleton 1983, p. 136; see also Candido [1995, p. 149] on the ‘‘liberty’’ of even naturalist authors). Literature draws on the social world, but it does so selectively, magnifying some aspects of reality, misspecifying others, and ignoring most (Desan et al. 1989). The reflection metaphor assumes a single and stable meaning for literary texts. Anyone who has ever argued about what a book ‘‘really’’ meant knows what researchers have worked hard to demonstrate—textual meaning is contingent,

created by active readers with their own expectations and life experiences that act in concert with inherent textual features to produce variable meanings (Jauss 1982; Radway 1984; Griswold 1987).

Despite repeated demonstrations of reflection’s myriad failings (e.g., Noble 1976; Griswold 1994; Corse 1997), the idea of literature as a mirror of society still seems a fundamental way of thinking about why sociologists—and indeed many other people as well—are interested in literature. A relatively crude reflection approach remains common for teaching sociology department courses on literature, and also in certain types of journal articles whose main interest is not the sociology of literature per se, but the illumination of some sociological theory or observation through literary ‘‘evidence’’ (e.g., Corbett’s article [1994] advocating the use of novels featuring probation officers to teach courses on the sociology of occupations, or the continuing stream of articles examining gender portrayals in children’s literature [e.g., Grauerholz and Pescosolido 1989]). Convincing research arguing for literary evidence of social patterns now requires the careful specification of how and why certain social patterns are incorporated in literature while others are not (e.g., Lamont 1995), thorough attention to comparative data across either place or time (e.g., Long 1985), and a detailed consideration of the processes that transform the social into the literary (e.g., Corse 1997).

Structural Reflection. A more sophisticated but still problematic type of reflection argues that it is the form or structure of literary works rather than their content that incorporates the social: ‘‘successful works . . . are those in which the form exemplifies the nature of the social phenomenon that furnishes the matter of the fiction’’ (Candido 1995, p. xiii). The ‘‘humanist’’ Marxist Georg Lukács is perhaps the seminal figure in the development of a Marxist literary sociology. Marxism is the only one of the three major strands of classical theory to have generated a significant body of work on literature. Lukács (1971) argued that it is not the content of literary works but the categories of thought within them that reflect the author’s social world.

Goldmann (1964, 1970), Lukács’s most prominent student and the one most influential for American sociology, proposed the concept of a

homologous relationship between the inherent structure of literary works and the key structures of the social context of the author. Goldmann justified his focus on the canonical works he studied by arguing that lesser works fail to achieve the necessary clarity of structure that allows the sociologist to see the homologies present in works by, for example, Racine and Pascal (1964). In the 1960s Louis Althusser challenged the preeminence of Lukács’s tradition through, in part, his emphasis on the autonomy of literature. Thus Goldmann’s work, though it was influential at the time of its publication, has been eclipsed as newer theories have made more problematic the notion that literature embodies a single meaning that is reducible to an expression of class consciousness.

The High Culture/Popular Culture Divide.

Traditionally in the United States sociologists have left the study of high culture to specialists in literature, art, and music. This attitude was partially a product of sociologists’ discomfort with aesthetic evaluation. Popular culture, on the other hand, was seen as simply unworthy of attention or study. To the extent that sociologists did consider literature, they tended to focus on high-culture literature, in part because of the largely Marxist orientation of many early sociologists of literature. Marxist thought defines literature as part of the ideological superstructure within which the literatures of elites are the ruling ideas since culture serves to legitimate the interests of the ruling class.

The tendency to concentrate on high-culture literature was intensified by the Frankfurt School, which understood ‘‘mass’’ culture as a destructive force, imposed on a passive audience by the machinery of a capitalist culture ‘‘industry’’ (e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Lowenthal’s ([1961] 1968) analysis of popular magazine biography, for example, stressed the increasing focus on leisuretime consumption over production and on personality over business and political achievement, as the private lives of movie stars and sports figures came to dominate magazine biographies. This approach highlighted the passivity and docility of audiences, tying mass culture to the increasing apathy of the public. Thus this work saw literature both as a reflection of changing social patterns and as a force shaping those patterns. Although researchers now rarely use the term ‘‘mass’’ culture, the Frankfurt School’s critique continues to inform much of current cultural sociology, although

often it does so on an implicit level as researchers react either positively or negatively to this understanding of popular culture.

One response to the critique of mass culture was articulated by the scholars of the Birmingham School. This line of research shared earlier understandings of culture as a resource for the powerful, but focused in large part on the potential for active participation on the part of cultural receivers. Work in the Birmingham School tradition drew heavily on feminist approaches and demonstrated how ‘‘mass’’ audiences of popular cultural forms might engage in resistance, undermining earlier arguments of cultural hegemony and of passive cultural ‘‘dopes’’ (e.g., Hall et al. 1980; Hebdige 1979). This interest in resistance and the meaningmaking activity of readers remains an important line of research, particularly for studies of popular culture (e.g., Radway 1984). The continued relevance of the distinction between high and popular culture, however, is now under debate, as some charge that the hierarchical dichotomy is no longer the most powerful conceptualization of cultural differences (e.g., Crane 1992; DiMaggio 1987).

Sociology through Literature. A final type of traditional sociological interest in literature also stems from an implicit reflectionist approach. This type of work sees literature as exemplary of sociological concepts and theories or uses literature simply as a type of data like any other. While Coser’s (1972) anthology exemplifies the former tradition, the recent ASA publication Teaching Sociology with Fiction demonstrates the persistence of the genre. Examples of the latter are altogether too numerous, including, for example, an article testing recent Afrocentric and feminist claims of differing epistemological stances across genders and races by coding differences in the grounding of knowledge in novels for adolescent readers (Clark and Morris 1995). Such work ignores ignoring the mediated nature of literary ‘‘reality.’’ These discussions, although common, are not properly part of the sociology of literature.

SOCIOLOGICAL ADVANCES

The 1980s saw the institutionalization of sociological studies of cultural objects and processes as most prominently indicated by the establishment

of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA)—now one of the largest sections of the ASA with over one thousand members. This groundswell of interest in culture did not produce an equally large increase in interest in the sociology of literature, but it certainly created a more favorable climate for such work, as well as reenergizing research within the field.

Wendy Griswold is the key figure in the contemporary sociological study of literature in the United States. Her early research (1981, 1983, 1987) set the stage for a new synthesis that both takes seriously the issue of literary meaning and recognizes the importance of extratextual variables, while deploying the empirical data demanded by much of the discipline. By balancing these often-competing claims, Griswold allows for a study of literature that is sociological in the deepest sense of the word. Her concern for what she has called a ‘‘provisional, provincial positivism’’ (1990, p. 1580) has legitimated the sociology of literature to other sociologists and has articulated to nonsociologists the unique power of literary sociology. By publishing repeatedly in American Journal of Sociology and in American Sociological Review, Griswold made the sociology of literature visible to an extent previously unknown.

Griswold’s work (1981) began with a critique of reflection theory’s exclusive focus on ‘‘deep’’ meaning, demonstrating the importance of production variables such as copyright legislation for explaining the diversity of books available in a market. A second project (1983, 1986) investigated the determinants of cultural revival, arguing that Elizabethan plays are revived most frequently when the social conditions of the day resonate with those the plays originally addressed. In 1987, Griswold published the results of a third project centrally located in the new reception of culture approach. This innovative work used published reviews as data on reception, thus allowing Griswold (1987) to address reception across time and across three very diverse audiences—an impossible strategy in the first instance and a prohibitively expensive strategy in the second when using interviews to gather data on audience interpretation. The 1990s saw Griswold (1992) beginning a large-scale project on the literary world of Nigeria, a project that returned Griswold to her initial interest in nationalism and literature among other concerns.