ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development of constructionist approaches to social problems in sociology and considers what lessons this holds for housing researchers in terms of the development of the still embryonic constructionist approach to housing problems. It shows how each new perspective that has arisen—including Marxist and feminist perspectives on social problems—has been strongly influenced and formed by perspectives and approaches that were dominant at the time of its initial development. The chapter discusses the rapidly growing — but still modest—corpus of constructionist housing problems research. The theoretical awakening of housing research which began with the new urban sociology and has exploded in the last decade or so has so far quite simply missed the influence of constructionist social problems. The 1960s comprised something of a transition decade between positivist and constructionist approaches to social problems, a transition well captured in Horton's analytical discussion of conflict versus consensus approaches to the study of social problems.
