Public Eyes and Private Genes: Historical Frames, News Constructions, and Social Problems

Sociologists have long debated whether social problems reside in the conditions of society, the social constructions of analysts, or some combination of both. While social scientists engage in such debates, the public develops its own views of social problems. Public conceptions don't necessarily directly emerge from the conditions surrounding a problem, but may result from a variety of cultural, political, and social factors. The theme for this year's annual meeting, Problems in the Public Eye, directs us to examine the depiction of social problems in words, pictures, images and metaphors available for public consumption. The emergence of social constructionism over the past three decades has transformed the sociological analysis of social problems. Rooted in the work of Blumer (1971), Becker (1963), Mauss (1975), Spector and Kitsuse (1977), Gusfield (1981), Schneider (1985), Best (1995), and others, constructionism has become a central framework for studying social problems. Our society's journal, Social Problems, is a major intellectual venue for significant papers on social problems construction, although by no means the only one. We can take professional pride in the impressive amount of empirical work this perspective has engendered (e.g., Best, 1995; Holstein and Miller 1993; Ibarra, Kitsuse and Schneider, forthcoming); the understanding of the constitution of social problems has been permanently altered by this perspective. A constructionist orientation urges us to take public conceptions of social problems seriously, at least as fodder for the ascent, decline and characterization of particular problems. Social problems in the public eye are not constant. In the context of specific social activities, problems may emerge, transmute, descend, disappear, or reappear, independent of any change in actual conditions. Public conceptions of social problems have histories and shift over time and place. My own interest in this area has been less on what becomes a social problem than on how problems are framed and with what consequences. The work Joseph Schneider and I did on the medicalization of deviance (Conrad and Schneider 1992; see also Conrad 1992) focused on how a variety of forms of rule-breaking, handled as sinful or criminal in another time, were defined as illness in our own age. We examined sociological histories of the medicalization, and occasional demedicalization, of these phenomena and outlined some significant consequences of medicalization. Our focus was more on the professional rather than the public eye, although we occasionally, rather by accident, stumbled onto public conceptions as well.