CHAPTER II CONTENT
Discourse analysis is based on the understanding that there is much more going on when people communicate than simply the transfer of information. It is not an effort to capture literal meanings; rather it is the investigation of what language does or what individuals or cultures accomplish through language. This area of study raises questions such as how meaning is constructed, and how power functions in society. The study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts. Magazine RackA discourse can be studied as something separate from the individual authors or speakers. It can refer to something that exists in society and upon which we draw in order to communicate with others. In a useful distinction, James Paul Gee (2005) describes the differences between discourse with a lowercase letter d and discourse with an uppercase letter D. The lowercase “d” discourses are invoked in localized settings and may pertain to the isolated context where the discourse is being shared. On the the other hand, uppercase “D” Discourses are integral parts of the culture in which they are used, and can be found across diverse texts. While the same text may have both lowercase and uppercase “d” discourses, the functions of those discourses are different and their analysis is treated differently. The analysis of both localized and cultural discourses has become an integral part of qualitative research in the social sciences a nd education since the post-modern turn.
To conduct discourse analysis, a researcher generally selects texts. The term text connotes a wide-range of possible data sources including transcripts of recorded interviews, movie scripts, advertisements, or a company’s internal documents. Discourse analysts usually select texts that are as complete as possible – an an interview transcript may be written up including all of the pauses, errors, and corrections. Carla Willig (2008) provides an example of how conducting a discourse analysis from the hand written notes of a researcher during a conversation is likely not ideal because the researcher’s notes of an interview may not have in the moment captured the nuances of the interview. Therefore, any interpretation of these notes is more of an interpretation of the interviewer’s perceptions of what’s important rather than an interpretation of the subject’s discourses. There are a number of divisions and distinctions that have been drawn to explain the ways in which discourse is analyzed. a nalyzed. One useful simple distinction is that the study of discourse can be divided into three domains: the study of social interaction, the study of minds, selves, and sense-making, and the study of culture and social relations (Wetherell, Taylor, & Yates, 2001(2), p.5). This has also been further divided into the following six different traditions (Wetherell, Taylor, & Yates, 2001(1)):
Conversation analysis Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical linguistics
Foucauldian research
Discursive psychology
Interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication
Bakhtinian research
While the six traditions outlined above provide some ge neral guideposts as to what kinds of research within the field of discourse studies exist, it is important to note that the study of discourse spans many different disciplines within the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. It can also be qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. Moreover, it is not even possible to isolate only one philosophical tradition or epistemology that informs the study of discourse (Wetherell, Taylor, and Yates, 2001). So it is more important to be clear c lear about what traditions and theories are informing your method of analyzing discourse than it is to assume that discourse analysis can only be conducted one way. Theoretical Principles of Discourse Analysis
The approach of analysis developed in discourse analysis and discursive psychology has been partly a product of the conception of human action. This conception emphasis the following features: ACTION ORIENTATION – ORIENTATION – Discourse Discourse is the primary medium of human action and interaction. Actions are not merely free standing but are typically embedded in broader practices. Some actions are Generic (e.g. Making invitation) and some are specif ic to the settings ( e.g. Air traffic control manage ment of flight crew). Action orientation discourages the expectation that analysis discovers a one to one relationship between discrete acts and certain verbs.
SITUATION – SITUATION – There There are altogether three senses in which discourse is situated. First is the sequential organization so that the basic environment of what is being said is what has been said just before that, but this setup does not determine what is next to come. Second is the institutional location in which the tasks and identities of institution are relevant to what takes place. Third, it can be situated rhetorically, such that the descriptions may resist actual or potential attempts to counter them as interested. CONSTRUCTION – CONSTRUCTION – Discourse Discourse is constructive as well as constructed. It is constructed from various resources such as words, categories, commonplace ideas and broader explanatory systems. It is constructive in the sense that versions of the world, of events and actions, and of people’s phenomenological worlds are built and stabilized in talk in the course of action. act ion. A person may explain not making ma king an urgent call intentionally by saying that the number was unreachable or of his own faulty cognitive processing. Although these principles appear to be abstract but these are developed through analytical as well as theoretical practices. Rather than being the start, action orientation is often the endpoint of analysis. In action ac tion orientation to understand what is going on it is important to understand the talk in terms of the way it is situated. The rhetorical character of the talk is one of the features of discourse that is to be revealed through analysis. Stages Of Analysis
Analysis in discourse research is highly varied and depends to some extent on the nature of the supplies that are available and how developed on the nature of the materials
that are available and how developed research is on the topic or setting of interest. The following are the four stages that are overlapping but broadly distinct. Generating hypotheses:Discourse research is not hypothesis-based, as is common elsewhere in psychology. Sometimes a researcher comes to some materials with a broad set of concerns or questions. The first part of the discourse research is often the generation of more specific questions or hypothesis or the noticing of intriguing or troubling phenomena. Discourse researchers often make analytical notes as they transcribe. It is common and productive to continue this open-ended approach to the data in group sessions where a number of researchers listen to a segment of interaction and explore different ways of understanding what is going on. Coding: The building of collection. The main aim of coding is to make the analysis more straightforward by sifting relevant materials from larger corpus. It involves searching materials for some phenomena of interest and copying the instances to an archive. This is likely to be a set of extracts from sound files and their associated transcripts. Often phenomena that were initially seen as disparate merge while phenomena that seemed singular become broken into different varieties. Problem or doubtful instances will be included in the coding- they may become most analytically productive when considering deviant cases. Doing the Analysis:Analysis does not follow a fixed set of steps. The procedure used is related to the type of materials used and the sorts of questions being asked. This contrasts is too many styles of psychological research where the justification of the
research findings depend on following a set of steps in a precise and orderly manner. In discourse research the procedures for justification are partly separate from the procedure for arriving at analytical claims. The research will typically develop conjectures about activities through a close reading of the materials and then check the adequacy of these hypotheses through working with a corpus of coded materials. To establish the relevance of these features for the activity being done, one would do a number of things:
Search for patterns – patterns – Looking Looking through our corpus to see how regular pattern is. If such a pattern is not common, then our speculation will start to look weak. We might find additional fine-grained organizations.
Consider next turns – turns – The The hypothesis is that the counsellor’s turn in designed in the way that it is to head off potential problems with what comes next. If next turns typically, handling has to be smooth, then support should be provided. In general, in discourse work the sequential organization of interaction is a powerful resource for understanding what is going on.
Focus on deviant cases – cases – These These might be ones in which very different question constructions were used; or where surprising next turns appeared. Such cases are analytically rich.
Focus on other kinds of material – There There is an infinite set of alternative materials that might be used for comparison. Validating the analysis:There is no clear cut distinction between validation
procedures and analytical procedures in discourse work; indeed some of the anal ytical
themes are also differently understood, involved in validation. It is always useful in highlighting some of the major elements involved in validating claims. Analytic Materials
Discourse researchers work with a range of materials. Although there is considerable disagreement about the virtues of different sorts of material, there has always been a general move away from open-ended interviews and focus groups to consideration of naturalistic materials and texts. The one feature all of these materials have - they involve interaction that can be recorded, transcribed, and analysed. For much of 1980’s and early 1990’s, open ended conversational conversatio nal interviews were the principle research materials. The tape-recorded interviews are the most preferred, conversation organized around a schedule of topics developed in relationship to the researcher’s concerns. Unlike traditional survey interviews, the aim is to provide a conversational environment to observe certain practices and discursive to identify the resources drawn on in those practices rather than neutrally access information outside the interview. For example, in Billig’s (1992) study of politi cal ideology the researcher was interested in the way his participants (family groups in the United Kingdom) dealt with issues that raised questions about the legitimacy of British political arrangements. He considered the resourcesrepertoires of explanation, rhetorical commonplaces-that research participants drew on to sustain that legitimacy against threat. Because of this aim, interviews in discourse work
tend to be argumentative and active. Interviews in discourse analysis have a range of virtues Focus: Interviews allow the researcher to concentrate on certain predetermined themes and questions can thus be ordered to provoke participants into using a wide range of their discursive resources. Standardization: In interviews all the participants a re provided with the opportunity to address the same set of themes (not withstanding the contingency of conversation) Control: Interviews let considerable control over sampling. It eases issues of permissions and recording. There are a number of disadvantages as well. They are: Psychological expectations: A major disadvantage in interviews is flooding the interaction with psychological categories and expectations. The research will have to deal with participants’ orientation to the interview organiz ation and their speaking position as group representative. Such orientations can productively become an analytical focus in their own right (See Widdecombe and a nd Wooffitt, 1995): more frequently there is a tension between the interview as an activity and as a pathway to something else. Abstraction: Interviews abstract participants from the stake and interest they typically have and the settings in which the y live their lives and what is going on. The y support participants to take action as theorists rather than actors.
Relative value: If the researcher is interested in a particular particular setting, relationship counselling, for example, and when there is access and the analytical resources to study it, why restrict oneself to people’s abstract a bstract talk about it? Naturalistic materials have become central because of their intrinsic interest than because of shortcomings in the interviews. They are highly varied. They could be video or audio tapes of flight crew conversation, social worker assessment interviews, relationship counselling sessions, everyday telephone conversation between friends and so on. The range of advantages they have are: Actuality: The thing that is being studied directly is documented by Naturalistic materials. If the researcher is concerned with counselling on an abuse helpline then counselling is studied. (Not theorizing about counselling, reports of counselling, conventionalized memories of counselling and so on) There is no extrapolation from something else involved. Action orientation: Such materials makes it easier to capture the action oriented and situated nature of talk. Embedded in the sequences of interaction, actions are studied. However subtle the analysis, the disruption d isruption of such embedding in interviews is likely to lead to analytical difficulties. Orientation to setting: Materials of this kind make it much possible to study participant’s orientations to institutions and settings. It is hard to see how one could look at the detail construction of the counsellor’s c ounsellor’s questions i n the abuse helpline without using
actual recordings from that helpline. Rather than persons and their abstract cognitive capacities research with naturalistic materials becomes more easily centered on situated practices. Naturalistic materials often present particular problems of access and ethics, and raise issues of reactivity. Nevertheless, perhaps one of the most novel and potentially useful contributions that discourse work can make to psychology is providing a method for collecting, managing, and analyzing naturalistic materials.
