“When You're Involved, It's Just Different”

Abstract

This article explores how people make sense of domestic violence. The authors argue that it is easier to make sense of other people's problems than your own. If people are trying to understand a social problem with which they are personally involved, they are likely to engage in interpretive work that connects their own experiences with the problem and with a possible troubled identity. However, the person not involved in the social problem does not have the additional troubled identity construction occurring. This process of evaluating claims and constructing different narratives of the self and the social problem helps explain the differences between victims' and nonvictims' understandings of social issues.