Asia Friedman

Toward a Sociology of Perception: Sight, Sex, and Gender:

Many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, yet few offer sustained examinations of perception. In light of this, I highlight the visual dimension of the social construction of reality by analyzing visual perception as a process of ‘socio-mental filtration’. Building on theories of social construction — most notably those using the concepts ‘frame’, ‘paradigm’ and ‘schema’ — in which expectations are the organizing force of experience, I focus on how social construction happens. One key effect of expectations is to enact selective attention, which is evocatively captured by the metaphor of a filter. Drawing on the case of sex and gender, I demonstrate that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of ‘socio-optical construction’ — adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction — may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the ‘hard problems’ of constructionist theory, such as the body.

A typology of primary care workforce innovations in the United States since 2000

Purpose:Innovative workforce models are being developed and implemented to meet the changing demands of primary care. A literature review was conducted to construct a typology of workforce models used by primary care practices. Methods:Ovid Medline, CINAHL, and PsycInfo were used to identify published descriptions of the primary care workforce that deviated from what would be expected in the typical practice in the year 2000. Expert consultants identified additional articles that would not show up in a regular computerized search. Full texts of relevant articles were read and matrices for sorting articles were developed. Each article was reviewed and assigned to one of 18 cells in the matrices. Articles within each cell were then read again to identify patterns and develop an understanding of the full spectrum of workforce innovation within each category. Results:This synthesis led to the development of a typology of workforce innovations represented in the literature. Many workforce innovations added personnel to existing practices, whereas others sought to retrain existing personnel or even develop roles outside the traditional practice. Most of these sought to minimize the impact on the existing practice roles and functions, particularly that of physicians. The synthesis also identified recent innovations which attempted to fundamentally transform the existing practice, with transformation being defined as a change in practice members’ governing variables or values in regard to their workforce role. Conclusions:Most conceptualizations of the primary care workforce described in the literature do not reflect the level of innovation needed to meet the needs of the burgeoning numbers of patients with complex health issues, the necessity for roles and identities of physicians to change, and the call for fundamentally redesigned practices. However, we identified 5 key workforce innovation concepts that emerged from the literature: team care, population focus, additional resource support, creating workforce connections, and role change.

Women Weigh In: Obese African American and White Women's Perspectives on Physicians' Roles in Weight Management

Background: There is little qualitative research on the type of weight loss counseling patients prefer from their physicians and whether preferences differ by race. Methods: This qualitative study used semistructured, in-depth interviews of 33 moderately to severely obese white and African American women to elucidate and compare their perceptions regarding their primary care physicians approach to weight loss counseling. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach and a series of immersion/crystallization cycles. Results: White and African American women seemed to internalize weight stigma differently. African American participants spoke about their pride and positive body image, whereas white women more frequently expressed self-deprecation and feelings of depression. Despite these differences, both groups of women desired similar physician interactions and weight management counseling, including (1) giving specific weight loss advice and individualized plans for weight management; (2) addressing weight in an empathetic, compassionate, nonjudgmental, and respectful manner; and (3) providing encouragement to foster self-motivation for weight loss. Conclusion: While both African American and white women desired specific strategies from physicians in weight management, some white women may first need assistance in overcoming their stigma, depression, and low self-esteem before attempting weight loss.

Subcultural Influences on Person Perception

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Cacioppo, John T., James H. Fowler, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2009. ‘‘Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97(6):977–91. Christakis, Nicholas A. and James H. Fowler. 2007. ‘‘The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 years.’’ New England Journal of Medicine 357:370–79. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Craik, Kenneth H. 2008. Reputation: A Network Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. Downes, Stephen M. 1993. ‘‘Socializing Naturalized Philosophy of Science.’’ Philosophy of Science 60:452–68. Fleck, Ludwik. [1935]1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kalick, Michael S. and Thomas E. Hamilton III. 1986. ‘‘The Matching Hypothesis Reexamined.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51(4): 673–82. Macy, Michael W. and Robb Willer. 2002. ‘‘From Factors to Actors: Computational Sociology and Agent-based Modeling.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 28:143–66. Mannheim, Karl. [1929]1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harvest. Mason, Winter A., Frederica R. Conrey, and Eliot R. Smith. 2007. ‘‘Situating Social Influence Processes: Dynamic, Multidirectional Flows of Influence within Social Networks.’’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 11:279–300. Mohr, Cynthia D. and David A. Kenny. 2006. ‘‘The How and Why of Disagreement among Perceivers: An Exploration of Person Models.’’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42:337–49. Rogoff, Barbara. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Schank, Roger and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Schelling, Thomas C. 1969. ‘‘Models of Segregation.’’ The American Economic Review 59:488–93. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life-world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Smith, Eliot R. and Elizabeth C. Collins. 2009. ‘‘Contextualizing Person Perception: Distributed Social Cognition.’’ Psychological Review 116: 343–64. Smith, Eliot R. and Frederica R. Conrey. 2007. ‘‘Agent-based Modeling: A New Approach for Theory-building in Social Psychology.’’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 11: 87–104. Smith, Eliot R. and Gün R. Semin. 2004. ‘‘Socially Situated Cognition: Cognition in Its Social Context.’’ Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 36:53–117. Tajfel, Henri and John C. Turner. 1986. ‘‘The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.’’ Pp. 7– 24 in Psychology of Intergroup Behavior, edited by Steven Worchel and W. G. Austin. Chicago, IL: Nelson Hall. Zerubavel, Eviatar. [1991]1993. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lessons Learned Designing and Using an Online Discussion Forum for Care Coordinators in Primary Care

While an increasing number of researchers are using online discussion forums for qualitative research, few authors have documented their experiences and lessons learned to demonstrate this method’s viability and validity in health services research. We comprehensively describe our experiences, from start to finish, of designing and using an asynchronous online discussion forum for collecting and analyzing information elicited from care coordinators in Patient-Centered Medical Homes across the United States. Our lessons learned from each phase, including planning, designing, implementing, using, and ending this private online discussion forum, provide some recommendations for other health services researchers considering this method. An asynchronous online discussion forum is a feasible, efficient, and effective method to conduct a qualitative study, particularly when subjects are health professionals.

Perceptual Construction: Rereading The Social Construction of Reality Through the Sociology of the Senses:

In this paper, I bring Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality into conversation with the relatively new subfield of the sociology of the senses to argue that greater attentiveness to sensory perception can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of the social construction of reality. When read with this sensitization, one finds implicit references to the senses throughout their discussion, but nowhere is sensory perception explicitly theorized as a part of the social construction process. Drawing specifically on their analysis of primary socialization, face-to-face interaction, language and relevance structures, and the fundamental dialectic of externalization, objectivation, and internalization, I demonstrate that processes of perceptual construction – specifically sensory attention and disattention – are key mechanism of social construction underlying many of Berger and Luckmann’s arguments. A more explicit focus on sensory perception not only clarifies and strengthens many of their observations, but also constitutes a renewal of their important call to examine the processes of social construction.

“There are Two People at Work that I'm Fairly Certain are Black”: Uncertainty and Deliberative Thinking in Blind Race Attribution

Geneticists, biologists, social scientists, and humanist scholars have powerfully critiqued race as a stable set of biological categories. Despite this, in everyday life, race is consistently assumed to be visually available in physical features. Racial categories also continue to be used in scientific and social scientific research as if they were self-evident and real. In this study, I examine the role of visual perception in the construction of racial categories and their recalcitrance in everyday thought and interaction. My observations are based on in-depth interviews with 25 blind people, which highlight the unique features of their nonvisual, non-appearance-based experiences of race.

Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

Considering the centrality of the visual to the dominant cultural imaginary of race in the United States, not to mention ‘‘colorblind’’ ideology, it is surprising that more scholars have not explored the question of race outside of vision. Enter Osagie Obasogie’s fascinating book, Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, which examines how people who have been blind since birth understand race. Obasogie’s key finding is that people who are blind, like those with sight, experience race as something visual. That is, blind people are socialized into sighted systems of relevance and learn to adopt sighted norms of race. As a result, Obasogie argues, they view their own sensory cues as mere proxies for the ‘‘real’’ information about race (which they understand as visual). Based on these findings, Obasogie suggests that the blind case reveals not only their own processes of enculturation into a visual racial norm, but sighted processes of perceptual enculturation and perceptual work that underlie any notion that race is visually obvious. As he puts it: ‘‘our eyes are trained to see race in particular ways— so much so, that even blind people see race’’ (p. 19). He argues that attention to these microprocesses of socialization through which we learn how to see race add important depth to our understanding of the social construction of race by examining not only how hierarchical meanings become culturally attached to racially coded bodies, but how race and color come to stand out as visually significant phenomena in the first place— what Obasogie calls the ‘‘constitutive question’’ of the social construction of race (see pp. 4, 18, 37). Further, the blind are uniquely capable of discussing these social practices that make race visually self-evident: since they ‘‘cannot be seduced by the immediacy of visual perception, their visual understanding of race is inculcated in a more deliberate fashion that is part of the very same social forces that produce the visual salience of race for those who are sighted’’ (p. 36). The sighted, in other words, are blinded by their sight to the social processes that produce the salience and coherence of visual race (p. 37). Obasogie’s book is impressive in a number of ways. It is methodologically rigorous and thoughtful. It is persuasively and engagingly argued. It is a deadly powerful critique of colorblind ideology. Each of these is important and deserving of recognition, but I will focus on two other things Obasogie does uniquely well. First, Blinded by Sight is simultaneously deeply theoretical and empirical. It brings a significant amount of interview data into conversation with Critical Race Theory to engage in empirically generated theory building around the social construction process. Obasogie’s refusal to separate being a theorist from doing empirical work is commendable and rare. Second, Obasogie attempts to describe the mechanisms of social construction rather than taking them as a given. The concept of social construction has become so fundamental to the discipline of sociology that it operates as an a priori assumption for most sociologists, and the process of social construction is more often taken for granted than explicitly theorized. Through his constitutive analysis, Obasogie begins to identify the cognitive and perceptual processes underlying the social construction of race. The contributions of Blinded by Sight are abundant and clear, and I have not even touched on Obasogie’s legal analysis. My only critical comment is that I wish the book was more engaged with the growing body of work on the sociology of the senses and with critical disability studies, which could have brought even more depth and complexity to his treatment of the sensory construction of race and connected the case of race to broader processes of sensory production of sociological phenomena. In one sense, Obasogie’s findings support the guiding principle of critical disability studies, which is that disabilities such as blindness should not be viewed as deficiencies. Indeed, Obasogie specifically argues 688 Reviews