This article combines a narrative approach on life histories, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, with the symbolic interactionist approaches of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It focuses on “negotiations” in qualitative interviews with alcoholics, that is, narrative sequences in which the interviewee's line comes into conflict with the line of the interviewer. From a larger study of drinking careers among alcoholics in Copenhagen, two interviews are singled out for a more detailed analysis. The two interviewees did not live up to the (implicit) expectations of the study: the presumptions (a) that persons contacted at institutions for heavily addicted alcoholics do indeed identify themselves as alcoholics and (b) that alcoholics are interested in structuring their life histories according to the development of their drinking problems. By struggling to defend an alternative identity for themselves than the one the interviewer had in readiness for them, the interviewees laid bare the (problematic) therapeutic framework of the study.

Danish 14-and 15-year-olds are at the top of the European list when it comes to drinking and drunkenness. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the struggle for social recognition -with alcohol as the central marker -transpires in groups of teenagers in Denmark. This article shows how alcohol experience and positive attitudes towards drinking are related to popularity and influence in the peer group. The function of alcohol in teenagers' struggle for recognition is so strong that the participants who drink very little or not at all are put under considerable pressure. With alcohol as a central marker of maturity -and the drinking teenagers' parents described as supporters of this viewnon-drinking teenagers come out as the potential losers in the negotiation of status in the groups. The data are drawn from a large qualitative study in which 28 focus group interviews were conducted with Danish teenagers. This article represents a close reading of two of the interviews. Theoretically, the analysis is inspired by symbolic interactionism, Erwin Goffman's dramaturgical approach to social interaction and the post-structuralist reasoning of Judith Butler.

No abstract

This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alcohol abusers and with some of the negotiations—about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility—involved in these interviews. The aim of this article is to show that interviews are sites of knowledge production and that interviewees fashion their stories according to more or less distinct interpretive frameworks. To illustrate the processes of assigning competence to interviewees, three unsuccessful narratives are presented. One thesis of the article is that the assignment of competence to interviewees reflects the degree of correspondence between the narrator’s interpretive framework and the theoretical preunderstanding of the researcher.

The purpose of the article is to suggest a development of the narrative life history tradition along the lines represented by George Herbert Mead and Paul Ricoeur. This theoretical approach is presented as an alternative to both subjectivist approaches, that continue the search for the solitary, true self behind the life histories, and to structuralist approaches, in which the self and its past experience disappears. In the article a theoretical framework is sketched that a) focuses on “the perspective of the present” but does not lose sight of the past, and b) emphasizes the interactionist dimensions of life histories but also pays attention to the self and its ongoing projects. The reasonings of Mead and Ricoeur are applied to a series of empirical examples, drawn from different areas of life history research. (Time, Narrative, Emplotment, Life Histories, Self, Mead, Ricoeur)

No abstract

This article examines the relationship between the drinking habits of Danish adolescents and the upbringing ideals and alcohol rules of their parents. It is based on three different data sets: a survey of 2,000 Danish young people born in 1989, a survey with the parents of these young people, and two waves of focus group interviews (in all 28) with adolescents aged 14 to 16. The study demonstrates that there is a sharp contrast between the views of the adolescents and the findings from the two surveys. Although the young people themselves are of the opinion that parental control has no positive effect and that drinking habits within reasonable limits can best be developed through trial and error, the survey data reveal a strong relationship between parents' attitudes and rules and their children's binge drinking. The more lenient the parents' attitudes and rules are, the more the children tend to binge drink.

No abstract