ABSTRACT
This chapter details the sociological thinking that led to tell the story of "Vietnam veterans since the war", and helps the reader to understand social movements in general and veterans' issues in particular. According to the view, scientists, whether of the social or physical variety, attempt to detect the regularities in and construct theories about the phenomena of interest to them. They derive hypotheses from these theories that they then test with systematically collected data. Unfortunately, the term positivism in sociology also is more narrowly associated with quantitative research using computerized statistical analyses, the more abtruse the better. The constructivist approach assumes that there is no necessary connection between how problematic a condition "actually is" and whether people consider it a social problem. A constructivist analysis should identify the protagonists, explore their claims and counterclaims, and reconstruct the sequence of events that make up the life course of a social problem.
