The quest for contented sobriety: a dramaturgical analysis of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the phenomenon of recovery as it is experienced and understood by \nmembers of Alcoholics Anonymous in Newfoundland and Labrador. Recovery involves more \nthan just changes in the brains and bodies of the addicted person. It is more than changes in \npositive affect, mood or personality structure. Recovery is more than the gradual modifications \nof behaviour associated with learning models. In this dissertation, I present a new and alternative \ninterpretation of recovery by applying insights from the fields of ritual theory and dramaturgy. A \nqualitative research design, using participant observation and in-depth interviews, were used to \ngenerate detailed descriptions of the social processes involved in recovery. Data generated from \nthese methods have yielded new insights into the inner workings of AA not yet described in the \nexisting sociological literature. Data from this study reveal recovery as a dynamic social process \nwherein the novice AA member, referred to in this study as the penitent, experiences dramatic \npersonal change and transformation through the twelve step program. The experience of working \nthe twelve steps is presented in this study as a personal rite of passage involving three phases of \ntransformation: separation, liminality and incorporation or aggregation. At each stage of this \ntransformational process the AA member must follow certain emotion display rules and learn \nhow to work with others in the home group to become a contributing member of a performance \nteam. The emotions and behaviours associated with recovery are thus strongly influenced by \nsocial factors which are unique to the subculture of AA. Findings from this study have the \npotential to flesh out and expand conceptual models of recovery and to better inform social \npolicy on addictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".