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The COVID-19 pandemic caused countries around the world to initiate societal lockdowns, especially during the spring of 2020. This article focuses on online gaming’s role in young people’s lives during the lockdown in Denmark. Informed by a practice theoretical framework, the analyses of 35 interviews with young people (16–19 years) examine how gaming proved to be something to do in a situation of nothing to do. The analyses find that the young people’s gaming practices were beneficial (a) in allowing the young people to maintain a social life and (b) in providing a legitimate social space for maintaining friendships and/or coping with boredom. The findings demonstrate that young people who engage with online gaming are capable of adapting to fundamental changes to society to fulfil their social needs and aspirations, including during a pandemic.

This chapter investigates the life stories of ten young adults told while they were under supervision by the Danish Probation Service. All the interviewees have formerly been imprisoned and, during their sentences, they received the psychiatric diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Having such diagnosis late in life, as adolescents or as young adults, provides the teller with a new cultural and highly valuable narrative frame for one’s life story. Life stories refer to the ways people “provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self”. Life stories are also crucial in understanding the manifold and central role of stories in society. In this particular case, the stories told by marginalized and deviant people in society, who are re-framed as people with a disability through their encounter with the criminal justice system by the introduction of a medically defined disorder. Supported and reflected by contemporary cultural themes, the diagnosis of ADHD provides a legitimate and meaning frame for understanding and narratively re-constructing life stories and possibly opens up for explaining often “hidden” or “untold” parts of their past in which suffering, losses, and pain are highly present. Life stories always contain moral experiences and a “transformative journey” (Mattingly 2010); they enable one to attend to the processes of change that these individuals are going through, when the interviewees hope for a better future and strive to do good. The chapter will make use of the theoretical framework by Cheryl Mattingly in order to identify different forms of narrative in data.

In this article we analyse the significance of silence in qualitative interviews with 36 individuals interviewed about high-risk, illegal activities. We describe how silence expresses a dynamic power relationship between interviewer and interviewee. In the analysis, we focus on two different types of silence: ‘silence of the interviewee’ and ‘silence of the interviewer’. We analyse how silence functions as an interviewee’s resistance against being categorized as ‘social deviant’, how an interviewer may use silence strategically, and how silence stemming from an interviewer’s perplexity constructs significant data. We conclude that silence constitutes possibilities for interviewees and interviewers to handle the complex power at play in qualitative interviewing either by maintaining or by losing control of the situation.

The paper analyses the self-presentations of three convicted drunk drivers: two women and one man. It applies symbolic interaction theory to analyze how the interviewees account of themselves and their driving under the influence (DUI) convictions. The analysis shows how uncontrolled and unpredictable features of the data generating process impacts on the interviewees’ self-presentations. One interviewee, a 28-year-old man, uses his dog and tattoos to close-in on his problem with alcohol consumption. Another interviewee, a 61-year-old woman, uses legitimate cultural scripts of being a responsible woman to neutralize the fact that she has been drunk driving frequently for many years. The third interviewee, a 40-year-old woman, refuses to conceive herself as a drunk driver. Rather than taking responsibility for her DUI-conviction, she tries to relieve herself in the interview by blaming her DUI on her social surroundings. The paper demonstrates how qualitative interviews are sometimes unpredictable and dependent on diverse feelings and reactions and how drunk drivers, generally conceived as moral offenders, need intelligible, normative social positions to relate to their DUI.

This chapter studies the lives of pigs in contemporary pig farms. From an actor–network perspective, the chapter focuses on antibiotics and other 'actants' that farmers use to control the lives of the pigs through different stages of the pigs lives. Within contemporary farming, a pig's life cycle consists of three different phases. In each of the three phases, farmers control the growth of the pigs by applying different techniques and, sometimes, by distributing different types of antibiotics. The farmers hereby controls the lives of the pigs immensely from the pigs are born and until the pigs, within less than a year, are transported to a slaughter house. Antibiotics, in itself a living organism with a somewhat paradoxical history, is a central actant in each of the three phases. Based on a large qualitative data material, mostly generated from the inside of Danish pig farms, the study, thus, analyses the pigs’ lives as controlled mainly by the farmers’ distribution of antimicrobial life.

This chapter introduces readers to the content, aim, and organization of this edited volume. The anthology addresses a significant threat to public health: the potentially fatal risk of antimicrobial resistance as caused by excessive use of antibiotics in health care and the veterinary sector. In this chapter, we outline its three main, recurring perspectives: ‘One Health’, the Danish context, and the social and human factors. The One Health perspective refers to a shared paradigm, which acknowledges the mutual impact of human and animal antibiotic consumption. Human and veterinary biological processes resemble and interact with each other, and so excessive use in either sector needs to be restrained. The Danish context, we argue, is particularly suited for ‘text book’ scrutiny as it exhibits a lower general level of antibiotic resistance than many other countries in spite of being, for instance, a country with significant veterinary production. We similarly argue that social science and humanities offer valuable, if not essential, perspectives to the issue of antimicrobial resistance. One of these perspectives is unfolded in details in the chapter, namely the concept of risk which informs all of the volume’s subsequent empirical studies.

This chapter concludes this edited volume. Altogether, the volume has elucidated a series of factors that might contribute to the relative low consumption of antibiotics in Denmark. Some of these factors concern how general practitioners restrain antibiotic prescriptions even when under pressure from patients. Other factors concern the regulatory system that limits the amount of antimicrobials that the individual pig producer must use in production, and the biosecurity concern among Danish pig producers that help in protecting pigs against infections. However, the studies in this volume have also pointed to room for improvement in the respective spheres. For example, official guidelines are difficult to translate into clinical practice for doctors in the primary sector, and pig farmers feel stigmatized as a result of the public debate about their use of antibiotics. Finally, this chapter concludes that a broad palette of social scientific methods, such as the one which has been invoked in this book, is necessary in order to accomplish a satisfactory understanding of all the social factors that impact excessive use of antibiotics, lead to resistance, and endanger public health.

This chapter studies the effect of out-spoken critics of Danish pig production on social stigmatization of people in the pig industry, including pig farmers and their families. In Denmark, as well as in most other western countries, the emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has caused a lot of criticism of contemporary pig producers and their perceived neglect of public health. Based on qualitative interviews with pig farmers and scientific experts and stakeholders, this chapter describes how expert knowledge about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) proliferates into sometimes very sceptical public opinions and how those opinions are experienced as stigmatization by the pig farmers and their families.

Contemporary research often relates driving under the influence (DUI) to alcohol addiction and young drunk drivers, in particular, to social deviance. Based on qualitative interviews with 25 convicted drunk drivers, this article studies the relationship between drinking and DUI. The article focuses on three different categories of drunk drivers. In the first, drunk drivers consider addiction to be the main cause of DUI. In the second, they position themselves within subcultural groups often engaged in using illicit drugs, alcohol, and DUI. Both of these categories agree with conceptions of DUI as resulting from alcoholism or social deviance. However, the interviews also revealed a third type of relationship between drinking and DUI. Interviewees in this third category rejected the other two relationships by dissociating themselves from alcoholism and social deviance. Instead, they described themselves and their relationship between drinking and DUI as normal. The article thus concludes that while some drunk drivers view themselves in line with popular conceptions of DUI, others distance themselves from these associations so as to present themselves as normal.

Aim This article explores how young Danish drunk (and drug) drivers relate to the risk of driving under the influence (DUI). Design The study is based on qualitative interviews with 25 convicted drunk drivers who in 2010 participated in mandatory alcohol and traffic safety courses. The analysis follows Stephen Lyng's concept of “edgework”, focusing on volitional risk taking and its effect on the acting individual's self-identity. Results Drawing on the interviewees' accounts of being arrested for drunk driving, the analysis discusses three different categories of young drunk drivers. Those in the first category view a DUI arrest as a loss of control and a reminder of the risk of DUI. Those in the second present DUI as a reaction to what they perceive as untenable social demands. Those in the third see loss of control - such as causing a traffic accident - as the ultimate way of claiming control over their lives. Conclusion The study shows that young drunk drivers have different associations with DUI-related risks. The more constrained they feel in relation to society, the more likely it is that they will divorce negative experiences related to DUI such as being arrested or causing a traffic accident.

The paper analyses risk behaviour as described by a group of convicted drink-drivers. Risk assessment is seen as a part of a complicated process reflecting moral values in specific socio-cultural settings and within a specific framework of time. The respondents' retrospective accounts of their drink-driving are interpreted as part of moral identity negotiations, focusing on four dimensions: drink-driving as non-voluntary behaviour, drink-driving as strategic behaviour, drink-driving and control, and drink-driving and 'normalcy'. Central to these negotiations is the fact that many respondents come from social environments (be that friend groups or workmate groups) where drink-driving is common and that they therefore do not regard--or did not regard--drink-driving as deviant behaviour.