ABSTRACT
The theoretical antecedents of my study, Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time, are woven through the fabric of my life.1 The ideas in this study arose as a natural consequence of my earlier experiences and previous studies and have continued to engage me years after publication of the book. As I look back, I draw on George Herbert Mead’s (1932; 1934) insights about time and action. The past informs our thinking in the present, the present informs our reconstructions of the past. Both time and action are emergent phenomena. Thus, what we bring to our studies frames but does not determine what we learn from them. Similarly, how we theorize reflects our interactions before we begin and those occuring within and beyond the field. Theorizing arises through analytic thinking about our field experiences, not merely recording and synthesizing them. Good Days, Bad Days is more than a discrete study of 115 interviews.2
Rather, it also evolved from views and questions that had long concerned me. Specifically, this study returned to my dissertation research on experiencing chronic illness and the reconstruction of self (Charmaz 1973). More generally, Good Days, Bad Days represents multiple standpoints and accumulated understandings from which I had viewed illness throughout my life. I grew up in the shadows of illness and disability. As a small child, con-
stant upper respiratory infections and hemorrhaging after a tonsillectomy taught me something about the “sick role” (Parsons 1953). My only grandmother’s wooden leg stood alone and unused in a corner of her bedroom but sparked the awe and fascination of a five-year-old. As a teenager, the advent of a beloved uncle’s and then my father’s serious heart disease reinforced earlier lessons about the fragility of life. Like my sister and cousins, I
pursued a degree in the health professions and graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in occupational therapy, an unusual degree to be granted by a department of design in a school of fine arts. The theoretical direction of my later research emerged several years before
I knew anything about sociology, much less about symbolic interactionism. During my sojourn as an occupational therapist, I witnessed revealing incidents that evoked my interest in patients’ perspectives and awakened a nascent sociological awareness. While working in physical disabilities, I observed instances of staff blaming patients for their lack of progress, inadequate motivation, denial of their disabilities, and I attended several patient-staff conferences that dissolved into degradation ceremonies equal to anything that Harold Garfinkel (1967) could have imagined. I saw firsthand the powerful consequences of professionals’ derogatory definitions of patients whose views of their situations clashed with staff’s. And I realized that staff and patients lived in separate worlds. Other pivotal events led to further realizations and fostered my sensitivity
to the social psychology of illness and disability. I became good friends with a young woman who had used a wheelchair since childhood. During a shopping trip one day, we parked under a tree. As I helped my friend get out of the car, a branch suddenly broke off. It slammed against the arm of her chair but did not touch her body. She exclaimed in hurt surprise, “It hit me!” The meaning of her response struck me. I recall thinking, how fascinating; the wheelchair has become part of her self-concept. Her tone as well as her words revealed that she viewed the incident as meaning more than an intrusion on her personal space. After several years of working in physical rehabilitation, I decided to
pursue a master’s degree to qualify me for teaching occupational therapy students. I aimed to broaden my background and thus began studying sociology but remained involved in rehabilitation through conducting field research. Again I witnessed how power differentials between staff and patients were played out and affected patients’ identities and subsequent lives. My interests in intersections between time and identity grew while conducting an ethnographic study in a large rehabilitation facility for the poor. I watched residents struggle against anonymity as they attempted to create identities in the institution (Calkins 1970; Charmaz 2000b). I learned how slowed-down institutional time contradicted the incremental, progressive movement of rehabilitation time directed toward returning patients to their former lives. This ethnographic experience sparked enduring interests in identity and time that I pursued later in my research about living with chronic illness. Good Days, Bad Days rests on having lived in these multiple realities,
having had this range of experiences. All supported developing the theoretical implications of my study. Moreover, I had gained an epistemological perspective and a certain theoretical sensitivity about my past before pursuing my research for Good Days, Bad Days. This epistemological perspective
formed a foundation for my research, and grounded theory methods encouraged conducting it with theoretical sensitivity. The imprint of my epistemology foreshadowed specific concepts in the book. Because of its overriding but implicit influence, I emphasize the place of my epistemological perspective in the following research story.
