JENNINGS, M. Kent  <br/><br/>
Political responses to pain and loss :  presidential address, American Political Science Association, 1998 

 - New York, NY :  Cambridge University Press,  March 1999 
<br/><br/> As a discipline we often ask ourselves if what we study is relevant to the lives of the people we study, an especially compelling question for those who study mass publics and public policy. In this article I argue that pain and loss experiences constitute one such critical set of personally relevant and politically significant phenomena. The genesis of this proposition resides in an empirical investigation originally designed for other purposes. To set the stage for what follows, I first briefly describe a study of AIDS activists and some provocative results from that project.