Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom

My research focuses on several topics including Autism and the Family; Medical Sociology; Mental Health; Social Interaction; Social Theory; Adolescent Behavior; and Gambling, particularly among Adolescent Males. My dissertation is an ethnographic study of families raising a child with autism. My preliminary interaction with each family is to attend dinner at their house and interview parent(s). From there, interaction continues in whatever way works best for families: I have attended follow up dinners, birthday parties, soccer practices, doctors appointments, game nights, school visits, support group meetings, etc. I have interviewed uncles, siblings, grandmothers, therapists, baby sitters, etc. My main questions/ interests include: 1) how a child with autism is incorporated into the family system, and how autism can be understood by focusing on behavior and interactions with family members in naturalistic settings; 2) how today’s practice of therapy, in which parents/families coordinate a variety of professionals, and some parents become co-therapists and the home “becomes a little laboratory,” influences family life; and 3) how the phenomenon of autism as a highly publicized “social problem” (i.e. the mass of information, the definitional debates) is interpreted and navigated by families.

My other research includes: 1) A quantitative study of gambling behavior, with a focus on poker play, among high school aged boys (with Daniel Romer, forthcoming in Youth & Society); 2) a paper that considers the widespread use of game metaphors in sociology and social theory (with David Gibson, Sociological Theory, 28:3, September 2010); and 3) a paper considering the relationships between nurses and physicians in 26 primary care practices based on an analysis of ethnographic and interview data (with Barbara DiCicco-Bloom [first author] and Keville Frederickson).