Julie Brownlie

‘Leaps of Faith’ and MMR: An Empirical Study of Trust

Möllering has argued for sociological research on trust that pays attention to the ‘fine details of interpretation’ and begins from the perspectives of those engaged in relations of trust. In this article we explore what it would mean to take up Möllering’s challenge to explore the interpretative elements of trust and the ‘leaps of faith’ trusting entails.We do this through an empirical study of parental and professional talk about the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination. We examine trust as operating in a number of interrelated ways: as a practice based on knowledge; as a ‘leap of faith’ experienced through relationality and familiarity; as working at a system level; and as shaped by relations of governance and by anxieties to do with the nature of social and technological change. Through this analysis, we suggest how an interpretive approach to thinking about trust is a worthwhile exercise.

Tasting the Witches' Brew: Foucault and Therapeutic Practices

Interaction is at the heart of most therapeutic practices, yet sociological work on the therapeutic has either tended to ignore this dimension or focused on it at the expense of understanding the wider social context within which such practices unfold. Not surprisingly, Foucauldian work on the therapeutic has, for different reasons, also tended not to concern itself with interaction. Yet there are those who argue not only that Foucault might be used in alliance with perspectives concerned with language as constitutive of social reality (Miller, 1997), but that such an alliance might be useful in analysing therapeutic practices (Silverman, 1997). In this article, I think through the theoretical and methodological possibilities and limitations of such an exercise by drawing on qualitative data from a specific set of therapeutic interactions. Bringing together an interest in therapeutic interaction and therapeutic government with a sociological interest in who is participating in which therapies could, it is argued, address the social context of the therapeutic while at the same time exploring the interaction through which therapy is constituted.

Social Bundles: Thinking through the Infant Body.

Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents’ understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies, the state, and cultural practices — material and symbolic. The article argues that infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the natural/cultural divide may now be widely accepted as artificial within the social sciences, we need to scrutinize how people in their everyday lives work out, and invest in, the distinction between the two.

Build it and they will come? Understanding public views of ‘emotions talk’ and the talking therapies

ABSTRACT Recent policy and practice debates about the expansion of the talking therapies in the UK have been concerned with the ideological premise of the programme or with questions of effectiveness, cost-benefit, availability and access. For the most part, however, discussion of the needs and demands for such services has been largely abstracted from any consideration of prevailing cultural orientations towards ‘emotions talk’ and the talking therapies. By drawing on survey data from a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study of emotional support, this paper looks at how such beliefs and practices are patterned across and within the general population in the UK, with particular reference to the effects of gender and age group. In doing so, it challenges the implicit assumption that ‘if we build it, they will come’ and argues for an approach to service provision that acknowledges the highly differentiated character of emotional culture.

'Beyond Anti-Smacking': Rethinking parent-child relations

Recently, it has been argued that ‘anti-smacking’ campaigns have been so successful that ‘explicit pro-smackers’ are now thin on the ground. Yet the use of physical chastisement remains widespread. One response to this contradiction is to focus less on parents and more on childrens rights. In this article, however, the authors draw on data from a recent Scottish study of parents’ views of physical chastisement to answer the following question: If the starting point for parents in thinking about physical chastisement is not childrens rights, why is this the case and what are the implications for moving the debate forward? Drawing on a more dialogical understanding of parent–child relations and recent sociological work on childhood, we conclude that while future campaigns against physical chastisement need to be shaped by a childrens rights perspective, they also need to be informed by understandings of the parent–child relationship and the meaning(s) disciplining has for parents within that relationship.

Thinking Sociologically About Kindness: Puncturing the Blasé in the Ordinary City:

This article makes the case for a sociological engagement with kindness. Although virtually ignored by sociologists, we tend to know kindness when we see it and to feel its absence keenly. We suggest there are at least four features of ‘ordinary’ kindness which render it sociologically relevant: its infrastructural quality; its unobligated character; its micro or inter-personal focus and its atmospheric potential. This latter quality is not the ‘maelstrom of affect’ associated with urban living but can subtly alter how we feel and what we do. We illustrate these features through a study of everyday help and support. In doing so, we argue that – as much as Simmel’s blasé outlook – small acts of kindness are part of how we can understand city living and that, despite the cultural trope of randomness, a sociologically adequate account of kindness needs to recognise the ways in which it is socially embedded and differentiated.

Bridging big data and qualitative methods in the social sciences: A case study of Twitter responses to high profile deaths by suicide

Abstract With the rise of social media, a vast amount of new primary research material has become available to social scientists, but the sheer volume and variety of this make it difficult to access through the traditional approaches: close reading and nuanced interpretations of manual qualitative coding and analysis. This paper sets out to bridge the gap by developing semi-automated replacements for manual coding through a mixture of crowdsourcing and machine learning, seeded by the development of a careful manual coding scheme from a small sample of data. To show the promise of this approach, we attempt to create a nuanced categorisation of responses on Twitter to several recent high profile deaths by suicide. Through these, we show that it is possible to code automatically across a large dataset to a high degree of accuracy (71%), and discuss the broader possibilities and pitfalls of using Big Data methods for Social Science.

Look Who’s Listening

In Part I of the book, I explored the cultural significance of disclosure, captured in Les Back’s (2007, p.7) claim that ours is a culture in which ‘there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate and gain attention’. Within the social sciences, though, the focus has been on talk without, curiously, much interest in who is doing the listening. Most of the discussion in the last chapter focused on our general orientations towards emotions talk, that is, on our beliefs and feelings about talking about our emotions. In this chapter, I focus on whom we are actually talking to. While holding on to a sense of the diverse nature of our relationships (Simpson, 2006) is important in order to avoid reinforcing a ‘hierarchy of intimacy’ (Budgeon, 2006), it is the case that ‘the listeners’ tend to be strongly patterned. In other words, while random acts of listening, like kindness, do happen, and we cannot ignore the significance at times of encounters with consequential strangers (Blau and Fingerman, 2009), some people are much more practised in the art of listening than others. In focusing on who is doing the listening, the chapter seeks to balance a preoccupation with the cultural imperative of disclosure with an understanding of the social networks, contexts and relationships within which disclosure is rendered possible (or not). In relation to both formal and informal support, emotions talk is the product of both choice and constraint, preference and availability — whether involving family and friends who are able and willing to listen, or local provision of talking therapies.

Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter:

There is growing research interest in the sharing of emotions through social media. Usually centred on ‘newsworthy’ events and collective ‘flows’ of emotion, this work is often computationally driven. This article presents an interaction-led analysis of small data from Twitter to illustrate how this kind of intensive focus can ‘thicken’ claims about emotions, and particularly empathy. Drawing on Goffman’s work on ritual, we introduce and then apply the idea of ‘empathy rituals’ to exchanges about emotional distress on Twitter, a platform primarily researched using big data approaches. While the potential of Goffman’s work has been explored in some depth in relation to digital performances, its emotional dimension has been less fully examined. Through a focus on Twitter conversations, we show how reading small data can inform computational social science claims about emotions and add to sociological understanding of emotion in (digital) publics.

Conclusion: Having Our Heads Turned by the Ordinary

Writing about ordinary relationships is not a discrete endeavour; the interconnected nature of our lives means that, in writing about such relationships, one teeters much of the time on the verge of writing a sociology of everything. Some readers might feel that this balancing act has not been successful. Others might be questioning the focus on everyday emotional lives at this time and asking whether sociology has not got better things to do in times of global economic and environmental crisis? Yet to engage with such lives is to engage with beliefs and practices about culture, reflexivity, emotions, vulnerability and suffering — all of which are impossible to uncouple from broader social, economic and political contexts and how we manage the challenges of these. Those whose specific interest is therapeutic culture, on the other hand, might be feeling short-changed for different reasons. The book, after all, has not really been about therapeutic culture — at least not in the ways engaged with by sociologists to date. Yet it is exactly because these previous accounts have failed to engage adequately with ‘lay’ accounts of ‘keeping on the road’ — and the ways in which such accounts often suggest resistance to, or lack of resonance with, the ‘therapeutic ethos’ — that the book came to be written.