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 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 and 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 companys internal documents. Discourse
analysts usually select texts that are as complete as possible 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 researchers 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
interviewers perceptions of whats important rather than an interpretation of the
subjects discourses.
There are a number of divisions and distinctions that have been drawn to explain the
ways in which discourse is analyzed. 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 general 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 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 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 specific to the
settings ( e.g. Air traffic control management of flight crew). Action orientation
discourages the expectation that analysis discovers a one to one relationship between
discrete acts and certain verbs.

SITUATION 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 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 peoples phenomenological worlds are built and stabilized in
talk in the course of action. A person may explain not making 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 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 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 The hypothesis is that the counsellors 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 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 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 analytical

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 1980s and early
1990s, open ended conversational 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 researchers 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
Billigs (1992) study of political 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 are 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 organization and their speaking position as
group representative. Such orientations can productively become an analytical focus in
their own right (See Widdecombe and 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 they live their lives and what is going on. They
support participants to take action as theorists rather than actors.

Relative value: If the researcher is interested in a particular setting, relationship

counselling, for example, and when there is access and the analytical resources to study
it, why restrict oneself to peoples abstract 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 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
participants orientations to institutions and settings. It is hard to see how one could look
at the detail construction of the counsellors questions in 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.