[A] Chapter 15 and Chapter 16

 

[A] Discourse Analysis/Doing Discourse Analysis

 

[A] Adrian Coyle/Chris Walton

 

 

[A] Video interview: Philippa Carr reflects on using discourse analysis

 

In Chapter 16, Chris Walton provides an account of his experience of working alongside other researchers in doing an abbreviated Foucauldian discourse analysis. In the video below, we hear another ‘insider’ perspective on what it can be like to use discourse analysis, this time from Philippa Carr who used a discursive approach in her Masters and PhD research. Philippa talks about why she chose to use a discursive approach and how she learned to apply it. She also responds to a question that is frequently levelled at discursive and other critical psychologists, namely what makes her research psychological rather than political.

 

[Insert video interview with Philippa Carr here.]

 

Philippa Carr is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England in Bristol in the UK. She completed her PhD at Coventry University in 2019. Her thesis explored how the super-rich use talk about psychological concepts to legitimize extreme wealth in television broadcasts. She remains interested in how extreme wealth inequality is presented in the media and how public arguments for extreme wealth are used to legitimize inequality and practices that impede social mobility.

 

Examples of Philippa Carr’s research can be found here:

Carr, P. (in press) ‘Extending the boundaries of political communication: How ideology can be examined in super-rich television documentaries using discursive psychology’, in M.A. Demasi, S. Burke and C. Tileagă (eds), Political Communication: Discursive Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carr, P., Goodman, S. and Jowett, A. (2019) ‘“I don’t think there is any moral basis for taking money away from people”: Using discursive psychology to explore the complexity of talk about tax’, Critical Discourse Studies, 16(1): 84–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1511440

 

 

[A] Exercise 1: Considering the functions of ‘all of a sudden’

 

In all of the approaches to qualitative analysis covered in the book, it is vitally important to spend time studying the data closely before you move into more formal stages of analysis, such as coding. For example, in their account of the thematic analysis process (see Chapter 7 in the book), Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke emphasize the importance of the initial phase of ‘data familiarization’ – reading and re-reading the data to develop a deep and familiar sense of the detail and overall ‘picture’ of the data.

This very much applies to discursive approaches to analysis too. (See Locke and Budds’, 2020, stages of critical discursive psychology, presented in Chapter 15 in the book, where data familiarization is part of their first stage of analysis.) If you can attune your attention to the ways in which language is being used in the data, you can notice features that might prove to be analytically interesting.

For example, in the additional transcript of the interview with Greg from Arnie Reed’s study with ex-soldiers (which can be found in Appendix 1 here), Greg uses the phrase ‘all of a sudden’ 12 times when talking about his experience of leaving the army and moving into civilian life.

Search the transcript for each instance of ‘all of a sudden’. Look at the text around it in each instance and consider what functions that phrase is performing. (Remember not to speculate on Greg’s motivations or other intrapsychic features. To do that would take you outside the concerns of a discursive approach to analysis which focuses on the functions performed by language.)

Is the phrase performing the same function each time or is it orienting to different functions at different points in the transcript?

Make sure you can justify your answers by pointing to supportive evidence in the text.

 

 

[A] Exercise 2: Extending the discourse analysis in Chapter 16

 

In Chapter 16, Chris Walton provides various exercises to help you gain experience in doing Foucauldian discourse analysis. Now you are invited to extend the Foucauldian discourse analysis of the transcripts of the interviews with the ex-soldiers David and Brian that Chris reports in Chapter 16. Use the same research questions that were developed by Chris and the researchers whom he worked with to direct their analysis:

• How did David and Brian construct the experience of leaving the army?
• How did they construct their army and post-army identities?
• What functions were served by these identities?

Use the steps that Chris describes in Chapter 16. These are a version of the steps in Foucauldian discourse analysis presented by Willig (2013) that are outlined in Box 15.2 in Chapter 15 in the book. Apply these to some or all of the additional transcripts of interviews with ex-soldiers that can be found in Appendix 1 here and that come from the same study as the interviews with David and Brian.

Remember that Chris Walton’s research group decided to analyse the two transcripts as individual cases. However, Chris warned that, with a larger data set, ‘the focus would likely be on identifying consistencies and inconsistencies in how people talked across the data set, in the way certain objects were constructed, in the discourses that were drawn upon and in the functions they served.’ Bear this in mind as you analyse the additional transcripts.

• In what ways does your analysis of the additional data confirm, revise or extend the analysis of the two transcripts reported by Chris Walton?

 

 

[A] Exercise 3: Applying a critical discursive psychology approach to naturally-occurring data

 

The transcripts of interviews with ex-soldiers constitute researcher-generated data. However, discursive psychology and critical discursive psychology approaches tend to favour the use of ‘naturally-occurring data’. That term refers to data that are not directly elicited by the researcher (for example, transcripts of telephone calls to helplines or social media posts where the researcher has simply searched for and gathered existing posts).

In Exercise 1 in Chapter 5 here, you were invited to gather data from online newspaper discussion forums about a particular aspect of a controversial issue at the moment or in the recent past. That exercise took you through the data gathering process systematically, working with the example of resistance to public health measures that were introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2020. If you did that exercise, you will now have a set of naturally-occurring data. You are invited to gain experience with another approach to discourse analysis and to apply a critical discursive psychology approach to that data set.

Read about a critical discursive psychology approach in Chapter 15 in the book. You will find a subsection there on ‘Critical discursive psychology’ that presents key references and some examples. Table 15.2 presents Locke and Budds’ (2020) stages of critical discursive psychology. Find out more about those stages by reading Locke and Budds’ (2020) article. Then apply those stages to your data set. Some stages will be more relevant than others to your specific data set.

 

 

[A] Exercise 4: Responding to the challenges in doing discourse analysis

 

Towards the end of Chapters 15 and 16, Adrian Coyle and Chris Walton discuss the challenges involved in doing discourse analysis and in applying discourse analysis to the transcripts of interviews with ex-soldiers.

• Has your experience of analysing the additional transcripts (in Exercise 2) and/or analysing data from online newspaper discussion forums (in Exercise 3) identified other challenges?
• How did you address those challenges or how might you address them?

 

 

[A] Exercise 5: Experience-based advice on managing discourse analysis

 

In light of your experience of practising discourse analysis in Exercise 2 and/or Exercise 3, what advice would you give to someone who intends to use a form of discourse analysis in a qualitative study for the first time?