The Uncommon Ground: Drunk Drivers’ Self-Presentations and Accountings of Drunk Driving

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.