Triangulation in the Classroom: The Importance of the Media Author(s): Donald L. Metz Source: Teaching Sociology, Vol.

10, No. 3, The Use of Mass Media in Sociology Curricula (Apr., 1983), pp. 319-336 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1317362 . Accessed: 23/08/2011 17:42
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media are an indispensable This articlepresentsthe argumentthat the communications part of the teachingof sociology. Whenthe social sciencesattemptto ignorethem, they sacrificemuch the Media and of theircredibility relevance. advantages. Moreover, mediaoffer clearinstructional reportsmakepossiblea form of praxisinsofaras theyprovidea basis bothfor testingthe adeor events quacy of sociologicalconceptsand assessingtheirusefulnessin explaining interpreting in the contemporary world Theycreatean opportunity triangulation becausethey represent for a thirddata set in the classroomto accompanythe scholarlyliterature the participants' and perwhenstudents'attentionis directedtoward sonal experiences. And they can stimulatereflexivity and towarda consideration theirown susceptibility manipulation marketing to techniques by of the structured served by the media In addition to enhancingthe biases and materialinterests the contentof classroominstruction, additionof mediareportscan also improvethe process by students to become more activeparticipants. encouraging

Triangulationin the Classroom

The Importance of the Media DONALD L. METZ Marquette University

hat pile of complementary textbooks that threatens to bring down the bookshelf is a sign of the times. Slang, styles, and crises change every few years. The world described by a five-yearold child sounds less strange to us than that described by a fiveyear-old textbook. Because of changing empirical circumstances, our observations of social life seem to become irrelevant, even if they do not become inaccurate. Indeed, the inherent datedness of sociological literature might afflict the best research more harshly than vague research or general theory; the more precisely the researchsample and its context are specified, the more difficult it is to locate populations to which the findings apply as conditions alter. Our sociological conclusions are timebound, and we must invest effort not only to make them valid but to keep them timely.
Vol. TEACHING SOCIOLOGY, 10No. 3, April1983319-336 Inc. @ 1983Sage Publications,
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THE INDISPENSABLE MEDIA

The semblance of headlong social change that stimulates our efforts to keep current is in large part due to the communications media. It is in the interest of these media both to seek out uncommon occurrencesand to make reportsof the most commonplace events seem unique, or at least new. This quest for the appearance of newness is one area of social life in which there is little prospect of change. Technology for handling still greater amounts of information are ready for mass marketing. Thus, the media present us, as sociologists, with an unavoidable problem - the necessity of continually reinterpretingour messages. At the same time, they may offer a way of handling the problem that has some advantages for teaching. We will do well to recognize that the media have become an indispensable part of modern sociology. What follows refers primarily to the print media (particularly newspapers and magazines), though the comments apply equally well to the products of some aspects of the cinema, radio, and television. For the purposes of this article, we can assume that the products of most of the media aimed at the mass general audience deal with a limited range of topics, converge in content, and eventually reinforce a similar, if not common, view of reality. While we are introduced to most topics by the news sector, documentaries, features, dramaticpresentations,humor, and even games and puzzles eventually take up these same topics. Some academic disciplines can safely ignore what goes on beyond the classroom wall (although we should all at least be aware of the economic and political pressures battering higher education from outside). Those disciplines that deal with generic units (the physical sciences), with specific eras (history,the classics, art, literature), or with formal processes (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can afford to distance themselves from the contemporary world. A periodic survey of academic publications is sufficient to keep practitionersawareof minor developmentsin these areas, and certainly of major paradigm shifts (Kuhn, 1962). Sociology is not one of these disciplines.

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Sociology is constrained by its claim to deal with society, an entity that is alwaysempiricallypresent. Sociologists cannot escape to the manageable moments of deep history, to exotic places (as does anthropology), or to the ambiguitiesof introspection(as does psychology). Those who try such escapes cannot long remain at liberty. At some point, sociologists must apply sociological principles to the world of their listeners. It is expected, and it is difficult. It is expected because the listener, who is a self-confirmed expert on society, is interested in how sociology relates to what he or she knows. The disappointment of this expectation will raise questions about the validity and relevance of the discipline. The application is difficult, however,because listeners representmultiple social worlds, and these worlds are constantly changing. The media provide a means for redefining a common experience among these differing worlds and an indicator of how they are changing. Sociologists must deal, one way or another, with the "society" presented by the media, with what Nancy Wendlandt Stein refersto in this issue's introductory essay as the "competing curriculum." The strength of the expectation that general principles will be applied to the empiricalpresentvaries from course to course within sociology. The history of social thought, statistics, and certain kinds of sociological theory may be untouched by such expectations. A few other discipline-centered courses intended for graduate students or for majors may successfully evade them, but courses designed for general audiences (for example, introductory, social problems, the family) or for special interests (for example, delinquency, medical, aging) are almost by definition required to include information on recent events. Medical sociologists can explain epidemiology by referring to the classic studies by Pott and Snow, but they are likely to feel compelled by the anticipation of the students to mention modern examples like Legionnaires Disease or Toxic Shock Syndrome. Such references not only clarify sociological conceptualizations and explanations, they also help to establish the credibility of the teacher and the discipline in the eyes of the students and the relevance of sociology to problems of the real world.

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THE USEFUL MEDIA The fact that teaching sociology requires that we give some of our attention to the media need not be seen as a burden. Indeed, it is not difficult to argue the contrary-that the media are useful and can be exploited for the advantage of the discipline. They can be consciously employed to promote some of our fundamental classroom objectives.
PRAXIS

The media provide us with examples of concepts and explanations (or principles) that are immediate and salient. They parade before us - observers, teachers, and students together - an array of phenomena to be named, categorized, and understood. In the naming, we achieve a dual purpose: We both illustrate and legitimate our sociological materials. Finding illustrations in the media for basic concepts is too obvious a practice to requirefurther comment. However,the consequences of such illustration are not so obvious. For instance, Fox and Swazey (1974) use a classical account of the gift relationship (Mauss, 1954) to explain the social complexities of organ (kidney) transplantation in modern medical systems. One of the messages of their work is that the social processes of organ donation are not yet institutionalized. The media regularly inform us about cases of organ donation similar to those mentioned by Fox and Swazey that raise new problems- of defining death, of determining the obligations of kin in life-threatening situations, of deciding which of these expensiveproceduresshould be supported by public funds. These actual cases help us to understand the meaning of institutionalization, which in turn helps us to make sense of the cases. The whole procedure is an exercise in sociological analysis. The social reality illustratesthe sociological concept; the concept illuminates the reality; the illumination legitimates the sociological approach. This procedure of continually seeking new illustrations can be thought of as a rough measuring of the congruence between our

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concepts and empirical reality.Insofar as we attempt to apply our concepts to a wide range of data, our efforts are a form of testing. We are asking whether our concepts are useful and how they might be modified to be more useful. An example of this process from medical sociology is the "sick role,"a concept developed by Parsons (1951)to describe the norms associated with someone labeled as sick. His classification applied well enough to people who suffered from the kind of acute, short-term illnesses that predominated in health care until recently.However, when we use the concept to describe present-day situations we find too many instances where it does not fit - sick-day status defined by contract; permanently disabled individuals; and persons who have chronic disease, mental illness, or drug dependency, for example. We learn from our application that the established sick-role idea should be altered or abandoned. Examples can show how certain concepts are unclear, narrow, or indiscriminate. Not only do media reports provide an opportunity to test the adequacy of established concepts, they also confront us with the need for new concepts. In some instances, popular usage promotes labels that we academics cannot ignore. Medical sociologists have not been able to avoid a term like "holistic health," which has been taken up by journalists, advertisers,social service providers, and researchersin nursing. In other instances, the media attempt to describe situations for which there is no adequate terminology and which seem to demand inventions from social analysts. For example, emergency medical services, which have received much attention in the last decade, have serious problems that seem to be related to an institutional intransigence that can be captured in a new term like "structural lag"- organizational resistance to change in spite of a consensus on goals (Metz, 1981). The media help us to notice new ambiguities. If we do not take the matter too seriously, we can imagine a parallel between this kind of testing by example and the Marxist idea of praxis. In its broadest interpretation,' "praxis" refers to assessing our understanding of social dynamics by attempting to initiate social change (Turner,1982). If we stretch that interpretation still further, we can think of our scrutiny of media accounts

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as a way of uncovering the practical usefulness of our concepts and explanations. Though we were not the instigatorsof the events in the reports, we can to some extent estimate the applicability of our social categories and principles as though we were. From this point of view we can see the potentially advantageous effects of giving media materials a prominent place in course content.
TRIANGULATION

Reports from the media provide potential data for classroom analysis. They include information from sources beyond the personal experience of either the teacher or the students, and often from outside the compass of the contemporaryscholarlyliterature. However, the addition of media accounts does more than vary and expand the substantive content of a course. It also alters the process of teaching by allowing for new forms of studentinstructor interaction. The media's beneficial effects on both content and process in the classroom have been recognizedrecentlyby thoughtful analysts of social science teaching. Paul J. Baker (1975; Baker and Jones, 1981), in particular, has combined the sources of data discussed here with a form of dialectical instruction into a strategy for teaching rational thinking in a social problems course. His teaching/learning strategy emphasizes a comparison of three knowledge systems - common sense, journalistic, and academic. William Hastings (1979)also gives special attention to news reports as they affect our understanding of social problems. Although their work and this article take somewhat different approaches to the subject, our conclusions are strikingly similar. In the traditionalcollege classroom, threeperspectivesare potentially represented:the instructor's, the student's, and that of the academic accounts of the discipline. It is at least arguable that in fact only two perspectives are expressed, because those of the instructor and the discipline are nearly the same. Obviously, the instructor has been socialized to identify with the disciplinary outlook. Faculty research takes its shape from established conceptual devices. Moreover, instructors will select materials that

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are personally congenial and will interpret for the students those that are not. In most respectsthere will be little differencebetween the perspectiveof the instructorand that of the academic accounts that are prominent in the classroom. We can thus consider the instructor to be an extension of the literature. It can also be argued that there is no single student perspective, since each student has a set of experiences unique in time and place. These differences can be important for discussion and for evaluating the plausibility of the sociological perspective. However, they are likely to be limited to matters of psychological or social psychological import. With regardto sociologically relevant characteristics like age, socioeconomic status, region, and marital status, students are more apt to present a uniform picture than a diverse one. Thus, there is some justification for regarding students as having a common perspective. Because there are just two perspectives in the classroom, the flow of information is limited to two movements: (1) The dominant movement is the instructor's presentation of academic literaturefor the enlightment of the students. Instructorsnot only have formal authority over conduct in the classroom, they also determine what material is pertinent and how it should be understood. (2) There is likely to be a much smaller counterflow of information in which the students reply from their personal histories, their intuition, or their sense of logic. The strength of this counterflow depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the students. Undergraduateswho have entered college directly from high school-the population the author is most familiar with - are inclined to be somewhat passive. Lacking direct experience with many of the areas covered by sociology, these younger students have little to contribute in any exchange. Older students create a different classroom atmospherebecause they have enough practical knowledge of the world to question the claims of the discipline, combined with enough self-confidence to express criticisms. The predominant pattern, however, is probably that which combines active instructors and passive students. We can significantly alter these classroom dynamics by intentionally making materials from the media part of a course. To

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ACADEMIC ACCOUNTS

1 2

4
MEDIA REPORTS

6
STUDENTS' ENCE EXPERI

5
Figure 1

the two conventional perspectives we can add a third and thereby triple the number of possible exchanges. We can diagram the revised class situation as a triangle consisting of three perspectives- academic accounts, student experiences, and media reports-each connected to the other by paths of mutual effect. In the revised situation, there are four movements of influence in addition to the two discussed above (see Figure 1). Two of these four additional lines of influence have already been mentioned in the discussion of praxis. We can restate them as follows: (3) Academic accounts help us to understand current events. Media reports enable us to demonstrate that the discipline is useful for more than integrating personal experiences and categorizing historical developments. For instance, when we begin to hear more and more about vaguely defined maladies like Tourette's Syndrome or Alzheimer's Disease, the medical sociologist can explain the social process through which new disease entities are constructed by referring to Conrad's (1976; Conrad and Schneider, 1980)work on the medicalization of deviance in hyperactive children. Influence also moves in the opposite direction. Whether they provide support or challenge, (4) currentevents help us to understand academic accounts. In addition to providing illustrations, media reports are invaluable for updating course materials. For

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example, it is impossible for medical sociology texts to be current with regardto such data as hospital occupancy rates, the frequency of Caesareansections, or the proportion of the GNP going to health care, but the news frequently provides us with the latest figures on these matters. Further,the media can revealweaknesses in our theories. Consider the difficulties of a functionalist approach accounting for a government that bewails expenditures for medical care and publishes scientific evidence and warnings that cigarette smoking causes cancer and other diseases, yet at the same time provides subsidies for the tobacco industry. It is important to note that while a comparison of media reports and academic accounts enables students to make connections between the news and sociology, it also allows them an active participation in the classroom that they would otherwise lack. For example, even though they might not be able to contribute from their personal experience to a discussion about role strain among nurses, they might be able to contribute items from the news, from special features, or even from the depictions that occur on soap operas. Where media reports are accepted as legitimate data, students can become researchers doing secondary analysisof information prepared for the mass market. They can learn by working with secondhand knowledge. There is also a form of classroom learningthat does not directly involve academic accounts, but ratheremerges from the conjunction of media reports and the student's personal life. (5) Media reports can provide a sociological context for the student's apparently unique experience. For one thing, descriptions of current events can help to combat pluralisticignorance,the feeling of each member of a population that he or she alone suffers from a condition which in fact characterizes a great number (perhaps even the majority) of people. For instance, recent publicity about the herpes "epidemic" in the United States no doubt relieved many infected people who were feeling uncomfortably unique (while raising the anxiety of many others, to be sure). In distinctly sociological terms, this process can be recognized as one similar to C. WrightMill's (1959)descriptionof the imagination'sawakening to the relation between "personal troubles of milieu" and

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"public issues of social structure." With a little help, lonely individuals can recognize themselves as part of the "lonely crowd." Again, there is a counter-influence. (6) Personal experiences can also condition media reports. Of course, news items are perhaps more vulnerable to personal critique than are carefully qualified academic accounts. Many students participate in events that are reported in the media and consequently have the opportunity to observe the difference between the event and the report. Some, like the student whose attempt to explain the lump in her breast prompted her to write a critique of the popular literature on "second opinions," may attempt formally to assess the extent of bias or oversimplificationin the media. These efforts are clearly important steps in learning about contemporaryinstitutions. The problems of evaluating the media will be taken up in the next section. The deliberate adding of media reports to the conventional perspectives of the classroom could be described as a form of pedagogical triangulation. The term "triangulation"is frequently used in sociology to refer to a technique of increasing our confidence in research conclusions by basing them on a variety of types and sources of data, methods (Webb et al., 1966; Glaser and Strauss, 1967), and even theories (Denzin, 1978). In the approach suggested in this essay, classroom conclusions are reachedthrough the reconciliation of three interactivebut distinct perspectives.A further pedagogical note should be entered at this point: When students are made awareof this classroom triangulation, their enthusiasm, as well as their knowledge, is likely to be increased.
REFLEXIVITY

If media reports are to be taken seriously as data for classwork, we must temporarily suspend our disbelief about their accuracy and completeness. If we are primarily interested in content, we cannot concentrate on the manner in which it is derived. On the other hand, a sociology course would be seriously deficient without a critical component. Fortunately,in this case the critical element emerges almost naturally, albeit with a little help.

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One of the reasons for incorporating media reports into course work is to encourage students to appreciate the variety of the media and the diverseintereststhey can serve.To this end, students should be urged to sample different forms of the media (National Public Radio and local weeklies, as well as network television), different types within a particular form (National Review and Mother Jones, as well as Time), and different sections of a particular type (newspaper items on health and medicine are frequently found in the sections on business, sports, entertainment, and especiallyin the "women's pages"). Such a samplingcan reveal how different media portray the same incidents in different ways. The variation in what is covered, to how great a depth, and with what kinds of language raises questions about the purposes and procedures of the media organizations and, eventually, about the influence of interests other than that of publishing "all the news that's fit to print." There are different approaches to encouraging critical thinking about the media. Baker and Jones's (1981: 132-134) discussion of critical reasoning is extremely well developed with regard to both rationale and formal techniques. The emphases of their approach are very close to those of the author of this article: explorations of data, hypotheses, and generalizability on the methods side, and a concern with value conflicts, vested interests, and policy decisions on the theory side. However, the author differs somewhat from Baker in stressing "targets of opportunity" whereby the whole class can be stimulated by the emotional involvement of a few of its members. In a recent semester, the author's class in medical sociology based its discussion of the media on three differences of opinion: (1) news articles about the alleged negligence of an ambulance crew ignored aspects of the case that the instructor found from his researchto be important; (2) press coverage of a holistic health conference seemed less thorough than some student advocates desired; and (3) some nurses in the class questioned whether a poor patient who needed a heart transplant was being manipulated by a charity drive intendedto help her. In each of these cases, the discussions stressed that without alternative sources of information, we allow the media to define realityfor us, that the routine proceduresby which

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news is gatheredoften bias reporters'accounts, and that the media have begun to function as a communication link between scattered supporters of causes. In each case, the continuing story encouraged students to pay attention to the media and to look for other sources of information. The medical reporter of the major local daily met with the class to present the perspective of the news organizations. Finally, the course examination explicitly asked about the relations of the media and the health care system. This shift from uncritical acceptance of the media to careful scrutiny can be encouraged beyond its natural course to topics of considerable sociological interest. Three subjects in that category are the social construction of reality,structuredbias, and societal functions. Social Constructionof Reality To begin with, we need to remind ourselves constantly of the power of the media to define reality for us. The public (including sociologists) are inclined to use media coverage negligently as a measure of the importance of events, though the media must produce a predetermined volume of coverage, whether anything important occurs or not. Remember when Skylab fell to earth? Similarly,our sense of the degree of danger on city streetsis determined more by how news beats are defined than by our direct knowledge of crime. Even our history is altered by the media's search for good stories; the term "faction" was invented (and is being employed evermore frequentlyby both publicistsand critics) to describe the fictional modification of factual accounts to increase their dramatic impact. This sort of tampering with historical data has been going on long enough to be considered traditional and even unavoidable, but the new name for it might awaken us to our dependence on these sources of information for the masses. Life continues if we insulate ourselves from the media, but it is a different kind of life.

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Structured Bias Students can be encouragedto realizethat what they learn from the media is selected, assembled, and broadcast to serve a host of interests besides truth. Here we have an opportunity to promote the judicious habit of asking, regarding any information source, whose interest it serves. The news items carried by the advertiser-subsidized magazines distributed free-of-charge to physicians are different in topic and tone from those carried by professional medical journals or government publications. But economic or political interests are only a part, and perhaps the more obvious part at that, of the pressure for bias in the media. There are more subtle biases, institutional biases, built into the social structure of the media and operating separately from the personal biases of the individual workers. Dependence on official sources, the timing of deadlines, organization of routine beats, geographic location of decision makers, and a predominance of white-male-middle-class-suburban workers all give a persisting slant to what the media tell us. A number of excellent books (Goldenberg, 1975;Altheide, 1976;Roshco, 1975;Tuchman, 1978; Schudson, 1978; Gans, 1979; Fishman, 1980) have recently analyzed this phenomenon. Functionsof the Media Focusing on the media is one means of studying how institutions are changing in our society. We seem to be increasingly relying on the media to serve functions that were once handled in other ways. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this change. First, television has become an important instrument for instructing children, not just forpurposes of enrichment and not just in the classroom, but for teaching basic skills outside the school. "Sesame Street," for example, drills viewers in the fundamentals of the alphabet, counting, colors, and other rudimentary concepts. Moreover,much of the education of adults on matters such

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as health comes from media programs and from feature articles in literature about the media. TV Guide has the largest circulation of any magazine in the United States. Second, convictedwhite collar criminals now plead that they should not be incarcerated because the public exposure of their wrongdoing through the media has been sufficient punishment. Thus the media are assuming functions once performedby the education and criminal justice systems. The kind of change heralded by these examples is not so much a consequenceof content as of technology. Perhaps McLuhan (1967) hinted at the main point when he titled his book The Medium is the Message. The action of examining our own relation to or participation in the world of the media is a reflexive2one. It mimics the continual disciplinary self-examination Gouldner (1970) called for under the title of Reflexive Sociology. The activity proposed here involves recognizing and admitting our own dependence on and voluntary compliance with the products and pressures of the media. As a classroom exercise,it holds great promise for advancthe ing self-understanding, sociological perspective,and knowledge of contemporary institutions.

THE PROLIFIC MEDIA

Advantages for both the discipline and the students follow from incorporatingmedia reports in course work. The use of the media potentially enlivens academic materials, establishes the relevance (or suggests applications) of the discipline, provides the student with a more active classroom role, increases the student's selfunderstanding, and furthers our awareness of how reality is socially constructed for exercisingsuch fundamental sociological processes as praxis, triangulation, and reflexivity. But opening the classroom door to the media creates problems as well. Two of the most serious are (1) the time required from the instructor to keep up with the current events and to integrate them into the course, and (2) the possibility that media reports may distract students from less vivid but more important topics.

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The media are prolific. To keep up to date without drowning in the flood of popular materials (not to mention the torrent of new disciplinary products), the instructor must use some basic survival tactics. Probably the most important is accepting the fact that no one can know everything.By admittingthis to the students, the instructor may well gain their respect for his or her honesty and at the same time give them an incentive to contribute information. Next, one should regularly check a few media sources that fit into the daily schedule. Telescoping activities helps herelistening to the radio while jogging appears to be the choice of an increasing number. Summary weekend news programs on the electronic media are efficient ways to keep up, and many newspapers(for example, The New YorkTimes) have comprehensive Sunday editions. We can pick up a few things by simply paying closer attention to routine activities; those despised mail solicitations are a source of potentially useful information. Finally, materialscan be recordedor clipped and stored in files categorized according to course topics. This enables the instructorto organize the media flow to some extent. Clipping files can quickly get out of hand, however, and the instructor should constantly (and ruthlessly) discard items that are no longer of current interest. Electronic media products can be taped and replayed, but they requirea lot of class time; written summaries are more easily filed and can be used when alerting students about reruns, which are increasingly frequent. Because of the enormous quantity of media materials, the classroom can easily become a circus if anyone feels free to offer input at any time. The fact is, however,that many of the students have little to contribute;these are the ones who benefit most from class time centeredon currentevents. Further,since most students have access to the same sources, there is a great deal of duplication in the material they bring in. Thus, the potential flood of information might revealitself as a trickle. Even so, considerable control is required to maintain the proper direction as students become more active participants. A few simple techniques are useful. To start with, the instructor can preempt some items by including them in lectures or by using them as a lead-in to the

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lecture proper. For example, the course might have a "principle of the day" which could make use of statements like a headline that reads: "Health Insurance Has Made it Possible For Us to be Ill at Ease." Still, as long as any contributions are solicited from the class, they cannot be expected to arrive just when they are pertinent to the main themes of the course. Some traffic direction is required if the intended flow of academic work is not to be disrupted. Several specific directions can be considered. Contributions that are especially time consuming or peripheralto the classwork of the moment can be "rescheduled"as a special report or recommended as the basis for a course project. Contributions of more relevant items can be accepted at designated timesperhaps during a "newsbreak" at the beginning of the class or a discussion period near the end. Occasional class meetings can be devoted wholly to dealing with media matters. One of these might center on a local newsperson invited to discuss the journalist's techniques for newsmaking. Such devices quickly become informative and effective classroom routines. The problems of overabundance are manageable. It is the author's experience that the benefits of employing the media in the classroom far outweigh the costs. The unavoidable need not be unprofitable.

NOTES
1. In a narrower sense, praxis can be seen as the process of shaping social actions to express a revolutionary consciousness, in the course of which the actor increasingly realizes the nature of social reality. One consequence of such action is the discovery that certain of our concepts are reifications, or are otherwise distorted (Appelbaum, 1978). 2. The term "reflexivity" takes a nearly opposite meaning in the employ of ethnomethodologists. They use it to refer to the practices by which accounts in a particular setting affirm the familiar, commonplace "reality" the participants associate with that setting (Garfinkel, 1967).

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REFERENCES
ALTHEIDE, D. L. (1976) Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. APPELBAUM, R. P. (1978) "Marxist method: structural constraints and social praxis." Amer. Sociologist 13 (February): 73-81. BAKER, P. J. (1975) "Social awareness project." Teaching Sociology 3 (October): 74-80. - - - and J. S. JONES (1981)"Teachingrational thinking in the social problems course." Teaching Sociology 8 (January): 123-147. CONRAD, P. (1976) Identifying Hyperactive Children: The Medicalization of Deviant Behavior. Lexington, MA: Heath. - - - and J. W. SCHNEIDER (1980) Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby. DENZIN, N. K. (1978) The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. FISHMAN, M. (1980) Manufacturing the News. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. FOX, R. C. and J. P. SWAZEY (1974) The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. GANS, H. J. (1979) Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Pantheon. GARFINKEL, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. GLASER, B. G. and A. L. STRAUSS (1967)The Discoveryof GroundedTheory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine. GOLDENBERG, E. N. (1975) Making the Papers. Lexington, MA: Heath. GOULDNER, A. W. (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. HASTINGS, W. (1979) How to Think About Social Problems: A Primer for Citizens. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. KUHN, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. MAUSS, M. (1954) The Gift (I. Cunnison, trans.). New York: Free Press. McLUHAN, M. (1967) The Medium is the Message. New York: Random House. METZ, D. L. (1981) Running Hot: Structure and Stress in Ambulance Work. Cambridge, MA: Abt. MILLS, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. PARSONS, T. (1951) The Social System. New York: Free Press. ROSHCO, B. (1975) Newsmaking. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. SCHUDSON, M. (1978) Discoveringthe News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. TUCHMAN, G. (1978) Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality.New York: Free Press.

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TURNER, J. H. (1982) The Structure of Sociological Theory (3rd ed.). Homewood, IL: Dorsev. WEBB, E., D. T. CAMPBELL, R. D. SCHWARTZ, and L. SECHREST (1966) Unobtrusive Measures:NonreactiveResearchin the Social Sciences. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Donald L. Metz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marquette University. His research and teaching interests include medical sociology and the sociology of religion. He has recently published a book on ambulance work and is currentvly writing about emergency service workers and rescue squad volunteers.