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Key Words labeling, stereotype, discrimination, exclusion, deviance
* Abstract Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurrence of its components-labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination-and further indicate that for stigmatization to occur, power must be exercised. The stigma concept we construct has implications for understanding several core issues in stigma research, ranging from the definition of the concept to the reasons stigma sometimes represents a very persistent predicament in the lives of persons affected by it. Finally, because there are so many stigmatized circumstances and because stigmatizing processes can affect multiple domains of people's lives, stigmatization probably has a dramatic bearing on the distribution of life chances in such areas as earnings, housing, criminal involvement, health, and life itself. It follows that social scientists who are interested in understanding the distribution of such life chances should also be interested in stigma.
INTRODUCTION
Erving Goffman's (1963) book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity inspired a profusion of research on the nature, sources, and consequences of stigma. Both PsychInfo and Medline show dramatic increases in the number of articles mentioning the word stigma in their titles or abstracts from 1980 (PsychInfo 14, Medline 19) to 1990 (PsychInfo 81, Medline 48) to 1999 (PsychInfo 161, Medline 114).
Research since Goffman's seminal essay has been incredibly productive, leading to elaborations, conceptual refinements, and repeated demonstrations of the negative impact of stigma on the lives of the stigmatized. The stigma concept is applied to literally scores of circumstances ranging from urinary incontinence (Sheldon & Caldwell 1994) to exotic dancing (Lewis 1998) to leprosy (Opala & Boillot 1996), cancer (Fife & Wright 2000), and mental illness (Angermeyer & Matschinger 1994, Corrigan & Penn 1999, Phelan et al 2000). It is used to explain some of the social vagaries of being unemployed (Walsgrove 1987), to show how welfare stigma can lead to the perpetuation of welfare use (Page...