People in Places

Zussman, Robert

doi:10.1023/b:quas.0000049237.24163.e5

Cited by 60 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…While the main focus was on the same group of about 20 wrestlers, I also spoke with pro wrestlers who have moved up to the next level and are now performing in the WWE or one of its feeder federations. 3 I not only observed and conversed with "wrestlers in their places," to echo Zussman's phrase in his evaluation of qualitative research (Zussman 2004), I also collected data on their behavior while they performed at public shows, recreated, worked out, and attended other performances. 4 Additionally, I have seen these processes over time because I was in the field with this same group for over two full years.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

Smith

2008

Qual Sociol

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This paper draws upon the relational turn in the study of pain to understand and explain the ways in which professional wrestlers manage and make sense of physical suffering. The paper focuses on how pain-laden interactions in the ring and the gym give form to the ways in which participants of wrestling think and feel about pain. The research is based on a long-term ethnography of professional wrestling. The article does two things: (a) explores the bodily skills that wrestlers cultivate to handle a context of ever-present pain, and (b) explains what the wrestlers' interactions tell us about the meanings of pain that wrestlers come to share. Based on the reconstruction of participants' lived experience of pro wrestling, I suggest that pain becomes attractive to wrestlers because it is given substantive meaning which encompasses denial, authenticity, solidarity, and dominance.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

Smith

2008

Qual Sociol

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“…Using qualitative methods and focus groups Qualitative methods are often able to break into the "black box" and describe the "how" and processes of theory related to practice (Zussman, 2004). Qualitative research strives to find creative ways of linking research to constructs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s Going On? Developing Program Theory for Evaluation

Arnold

Nott

2010

JYD

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This paper outlines the process undertaken to develop a program logic model into a program theory that could be tested through a large scale evaluation. Logic models are widely promoted to establish program intention and outcomes, thus setting the stage for effective program evaluation. However, the causal links in program logic models are often assumptive in nature, and lack the specificity of conditions needed in order for the program to achieve its planned success. The authors share a process of observation and focus groups that allowed them to probe some of the links of the program logic model. The result presented is an "enhanced" logic model that reveals possible moderators of program success, which leads to the development of evaluation questions that will be used in a subsequent large-scale evaluation. The value of using an enhanced logic model for program evaluation leading to program policy changes and improvement is underscored.

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“…The interactionist approach, on the other hand, leads us to examine how partners jointly negotiate and make sense of embodied sensations and sexual practices more generally. It holds that subjects are continuously negotiating normative expectations and assumptions in the coproduction of an interaction, thus creating and recreating meanings and, ultimately, the social (Fine 2001;Zussman 2004). In this study, we are interested in how people negotiate the interplay between normative ideas about what sex is, what it should feel and be like, and sexual practices as they take shape in embodied interactions.…”

Section: Studying Sex As Practice Interaction Meaning-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbalizing Sensations: Making Sense of Embodied Sexual Experiences

2019

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Embodied experiences are strongly felt, but hard to communicate or verbalize. This article examines people's articulation and sense-making of their sexual sensations, during interviews, to gain insight into what we refer to as a "perceptual loop" between embodied sensations, body-sensorial knowledge, and social meanings. We employ a combination of interactionist and practice theory to study sex as an embodied practice that unfolds in interactions. We analyze this using in-depth interviews with 34 Dutch women and men about their sexual interactions. We focus on how they make sense, with their partner and with the interviewer, of their embodied experiences within an interview setting that requires them to verbalize their experience. Participants communicated these embodied sensations by (1) using multiinterpretable sensory wordings; (2) drawing comparisons between different sexual sensations; and (3) referring to other sensory sensations, and by exemplifying their effect (e.g. breathing, shrieking). We argue that to analyze people's verbalized understanding of their sensations, we need to attend to an ongoing feedback process: sex both shapes and is shaped by social meaning and cultural knowledge. Embodied sensations are not the material onto which the social is mapped. Instead, embodied practices and interactions mediate and shape the social, leading to body-sensorial knowledge. While sex, as an intense embodied practice, is a strategic case to show this process, this "perceptual loop" between embodied practice and bodysensorial knowledge occurs in all human (inter)actions.Embodied experiences are strongly felt, but hard to communicate or verbalize. While these experiences can tell us much about human life, researching them presents us with practical Qualitative Sociology (2019) 42:411-430 https://doi.

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People in Places

Cited by 60 publications

References 20 publications

Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

What’s Going On? Developing Program Theory for Evaluation

Verbalizing Sensations: Making Sense of Embodied Sexual Experiences

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