Seeing Defective Individuals

Abstract

We set out to understand adolescent worlds. The research began by locating these worlds through participant observation conducted by fieldworkers who accompanied adolescents in their schools, neighbourhoods and friendship groups. The study continued by means of interviews in which the line of questioning assumed the existence both of social worlds and of the interviewee’s involvement in those worlds.¹ In contrast, most researchers who investigate adolescent drug use are looking for entities other than social worlds. Operating from the epidemiological and political models discussed in Chapter 1, they expect personality variables, physiological effects and deviants. Their experiments and surveys deliver these entities to them as surely as our participant observation and interviewing bring us social worlds.