Discourse Analysis

Question 1

Discourse Analysis

Answer 1

· Analysis of talk and text as an important focus in and of itself.
· DA aims to understand how talk and text construct particular versions of reality and identify the social consequences of these constructions (Riley & Wiggins, 2019).
· Concerns:
- The way language constructs reality and the way it manages to do things.
- The way that people manage to do things with language.

Question 2

discourse

Answer 2

· Spoken & written utterances.
· Discourse: any form of talk or text in any social interaction.
· Discourse – not individuals – as the ‘unit’ of analysis.
· Discourse is a phenomenon with its own properties, which have an impact on people and their social interactions (McKinlay & McVittie, 2008).

Question 3

‘Turn to language’ in psychology:

Answer 3

· Part of the ‘turn to language’ movement that occurred in the 1980s in the social sciences.
· Discursive Psychology (DP) – introduced by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell (1987).
· Critiques of how cognition is understood in psychology:
- Psychology tends to treat discourse as the expression of thoughts, intentions and cognitive structures.
- DP claims that psychologists cannot accurately have access to what people ‘really think’.

Question 4

The ‘golden rule’:

Answer 4

· Text and language are not so much as a representation of the world but also as a construction.
· Not really interested in identifying people’s attitudes, experiences, beliefs, identities, emotions, etc.
· These are all ways of talking, ways of constructing the world – i.e., discursive practices.
· The focus is on what is being done (actions), not on the mental states that may or may not underpin those actions.

Question 5

social actions

Answer 5

· Social actions – The kinds of things that we do in talk and interaction.
- We never ‘just’ talk. We discuss, ask, praise, make promises, complain, console, deny, etc.
· Discourse analysts are interested in what talk does, including:
- Identity claims.
- Moving a conversation forward.
- Providing details can make a version of events sound persuasive or more believable.

Question 6

Some guidelines for conducing psychological DA:

Answer 6

· Research question
· Data sources
· Transcribing
· Analysing
- Annotating
- Identifying social actions and rhetorical devices.

Question 7

Deciding on an appropriate question for DA:

Answer 7

· Focus of research questions:
- How specific actions and practices are linguistically done in particular settings.
- How particular accounts of things are constructed and made to seem factual and objective or how factual accounts are challenged.
- How racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia and other oppressions are expressed, justified, et

Question 8

Picking appropriate sources of data:

Answer 8

· Preference for naturally occurring data.
· Any form of interaction between people:
- Everyday settings (e.g., family homes, public places).
- Institutional settings (e.g., schools, workplaces).
- Mediated interaction (e.g., computer, TV, telephone).
- Researcher-generated settings (e.g., in interviews, focus groups, etc.).

Question 9

Transcribing the data:

Answer 9

· As with all qualitative approaches, this is an important part of the analytic process:
- Initial ‘notes’ can be developed during the transcription process.
- Aids familiarisation with your data.
- DA often uses the Jefferson/Jeffersonian transcription.

Question 10

Analysis:

Answer 10

· Involves annotating = a similar process to coding in thematic analysis:
- Read and re-read the data corpus.
- Organise the data into smaller sections for analysis.
· Annotating is an iterative process: it usually takes several rounds.

Question 11

Describing what is going on in the interaction:

Answer 11

· What was said/written
- Type of word or phrases used, cultural context, etc.
· How it was said/written
- Anything about its prosody or delivery: rising intonation, loud or whispered talk, smiley voice, laughter, etc..
· When it was said/written
- Where the word of phrase is positioned within the speaker’s turn at talk (e.g., at the beginning of their turn).

Question 12

‘Spotting’ discursive practices:

Answer 12

· DA is not interested in what people are ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, experiencing’, etc., but in what they are doing when they talk.
- Goodman (2017): blaming, excusing, denying, constructing facts, managing stake and interest, answering a question, etc.
· A large part of the analysis relies on ‘spotting’ discursive practices – ways of talking, ways of constructing reality – already documented.

Question 13

Identifying social actions:

Answer 13

· Process of identifying and explicating social actions.
- Search for patterns – similarities and differences.
· Showing what actions are accompanied by discursive practices:
- What action? To perform what?
- How the ‘psychological business’ is managed in the process of doing these actions.

Question 14

Rhetorical devices as analytical tools:

Answer 14

· Ways of talking and writing, that are recognizable and recurrent across different interactional contexts, and which help to perform social actions. (Wiggins, 2017).
· Examine how the identified devices are used in the interactions to accomplish particular social actions.
· Not all of the devices are used in the same analysis, but more than one device is typically used to examine any section of the talk.

Question 15

Some rhetorical devices and their functions:

Answer 15

· Disclaimer
· Stake inoculation
· Extreme case formulation
· Category entitlement
· Passive voice
· Three-part list
· Identity claims

Question 16

Disclaimers:

Answer 16

· These are inserted statements before the main account to try to mitigate the speaker’s stance on a particular issue. They make visible a particular interpretation of what they are going to say, then explicitly deny this.
· This way, they deny the criticism before it can even be made.
· These often work alongside category membership-type issues (i.e., when a speaker’s identity is being explicitly addressed).

Question 17

Stake inoculation:

Answer 17

· A speaker denies – or down-plays – the potential claim that they have a stake, a prior interest or motive in a particular argument or course of action (even before they are challenged on it).
- This is where speakers construct their talk to defend against the claim that they might have a stake in what they are saying (i.e., that they might be biased or subjective

Question 18

Extreme case formulation:

Answer 18

· A phrase or word that is semantically extreme – i.e., invoking the maximal or minimal properties of an object, person or event.
· Can be used to justify or strengthen an argument, add credibility and manage one’s identity.
· Often using expressions including extreme terms such as all, none, most, every, least, absolutely, completely
- Similar to hyperbole – it often involves exaggeration and is typically treated as non-literal descriptions.

Question 19

Category entitlement:

Answer 19

· Using a category to refer to a person or category-bound activity (e.g., age, gender, job/career, family position).
· Inferences can be made from either categories of persons or activities and who might or might not be expected to engage in such activities:
- ‘You’d expect the builder to come on time, wouldn’t you?’
· Also, we accept that certain categories of people (e.g., ‘experts’) are entitled to make specific knowledge claims, so we give special credence to their accounts.

Question 20

Passive voice:

Answer 20

· Use of the passive voice – object and verb but weak, indeterminate subject – is a way to downplay the responsibility of the actor in relation to the verb.
- ‘Police killed rioters’ vs ‘the rioters were killed’
- This avoids mention of the killers themselves.
· This can allow the speaker to avoid or even shift attributions of blame.
- ‘The participants were taken into the lab where the dangerous electric-shock experiment was to take place’ vs ‘we took the participants (…)’

Question 21

Three-past list:

Answer 21

· Lists of three sound particularly complete, satisfying and convincing.
- Ein volk, ein reich, ein fuhrer! (One people, one empire, one leader!) – Adolf Hitler.
- Liberté, égalité, fraternité! (Freedom, equality, brotherhood!) – the rallying cry of the French Revolution.
- Ask me my three main priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education! – Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party Conference in 1996.
· In arguments, they serve to construct a picture of evidence building up.

Question 22

Identity claims:

Answer 22

· Identity as something done in talk to achieve various objectives
· Identity claims are seen as ‘acts’ through which people create new definitions of who they are

Question 23

Validity in DA:

Answer 23

· When is an analytic claim justified?
· The usual criteria for assessing validity:
- Discuss your analysis with others (e.g., Do they read the text in the same way as you?)
- The written presentation (illustrative examples) itself allows readers to judge.

Question 24

Reliability in DA:

Answer 24

· If the same material is examined twice or more, do you (or others) get the same answer?
· The rhetorical devices have specific and identifiable features that you and other analysts can refer to for consistency ‘checkable’.
· Coherence between methods and findings, and transparency and auditable research process.

Question 25

Advantages of DA:

Answer 25

· DA gives you the tools to study how people do things with words and how language constructs reality.
· Hence, it is useful for studying power (and being critical).
· Can study almost any topic in psychology:
· Can use a wide variety of types of data (secondary data as well as primary data).