The social construction of noncompliance: a study of health care and social service providers in everyday practice

This study investigates the social construction of noncompliance by clinicians, social workers, and alcohol counsellors in a multiservice health care and social service agency. Based upon data from in‐depth interviews and long term observations, it is suggested that noncompliance, like other categories of deviance, is socially constructed and subjectively denned and interpreted. Staff members of this agency subjectively defined noncompliance as the extent to which clients' behaviours deviated from expectations of appropriate, proper and reasonable client behaviour. In addition, staff members interpreted the meanings of clients' noncompliance by subjectively assessing the intent underlying their clients' noncompliant acts. Their assessments, in turn, served to structure their subsequent interactions with clients and provided the rational and moral bases for constructing the strategies they used to manage clients' noncompliant behaviours and bring about compliance.