Final Blog:-( or ;-)

In a word, Discourse Analysis means Doing Analysis. (Antaki et al., 2003)

I think that the overall arching connection between these readings was that qualitative research is equivalent in its own right to quantitative research, but that a problem that comes up in this line of work is that the researcher doesn’t pay it the respect that it deserves.  The research isn’t always done accurately, the analysis is sloppy, or time hasn’t been devoted to developing the craft as they should have.  Researchers need to spend time learning about what an interview is and isn’t.  They need to recognize how to really do the analysis, so that it is conducted and verified by the data itself, such as being followed up in the next turn.  This isn’t easy work and if done correctly, provides everything that quantitative researchers are looking for, i.e., validity, without all of those messy numbers. 

In terms of the Golato article, I found the concept of DCTs interesting, but I was left with that feeling of ‘Duh!’  Humans are infallible.  They are different.  No interaction can ever truly be replicated, because nothing can ever been the same in a subsequent interaction.  For example, I am sitting on my couch typing this paper and my husband has been researching vacation destination for us for winter break.  He was excited about taking me on a beach vacation, because he knows how much I love the beach.  When he got my deflated reaction about the possible cold weather in late December, he went back to looking.  From this point forward, every vacation option he encounters that involves a North American beach will be viewed differently than before.  Our interaction changed his perception.  If he or someone else tried to replicate our interaction, they would approach it with a different stance. 

Golato talked about the function of a compliment in a classroom and non-institutional setting and it made me think about a southern term that we have blogged about before, ‘Bless your heart.’  Anywhere in America that saying would appear to be a sympathetic statement, but in the south, it probably means the speaker thinks that the intended is an idiot.  Context matters.  Background knowledge matters.  This also made me think of Peter Johnston’s Choice Words or Opening Minds.  The simplest of phrases can be interpreted in a number of ways based on the context in which they are said or based on the tone of voice or the mood that the participants are in. 

Potter, J. & Hepburn, A.  (2011).  Eight challenges for interview researchers.  For J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (Eds) (forthcoming).  Handbook of Interview Research (2^nd Ed.). London: Sage.

The irony is that qualitative interviews are massively overused, but their potential has been massively restricted.

Our aim in this chapter is to make the case that interviewing has been too easy, too obvious, too little studied and too open to providing a convenient launch pad for poor research…faces up to a series of 8 challenges.

Set 1 (reporting to the interview study):

1)   improving the transparency of the interview set-up (how participants are recruited);

2)   more fully displaying the active role of the interviewer (interview is interactional, but not followed through in research practice);

3)   using representational forms that show the interactional production of interviews;

4)   tying analytic observations to specific interview elements.

Set 2 (analysis of the interview):

5)   how interviews are flooded with social science categories, assumptions and research agenda;

6)   the varying footing of interviewer and interviewee;

7)   the orientations to stake and interest on the part of the interviewer and interviewee;

8)   the way cognitive, individualist assumptions about human actors are presupposed.

Golato, A. (2003).  Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occurring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90-121.

Golato argues that ‘recording naturally occurring talk-in-interaction enables the researcher to study how language is organized and realized in natural settings (pg. 90.’

Comparative studies (e.g. Yuan 2001) of role plays and naturally occurring conversations have indeed shown that what is said and, more importantly, how it is said differ drastically in role plays and in actual conversations (pg. 94).

Study of classroom compliments versus non-classroom compliments…’One cannot assume that compliment serve identical functions and have the same design in ordinary and institutional talk (pg. 96).’

Goodman, S. (2008).  The generalizability of discursive research. Qualitative research in psychology, 5, 265-275.

‘I show how such findings (discourse analytic findings) can be considered generalizable to the extent that they can show how a particular discursive strategy will often bring about the same interactional results (pg. 265).’

-quantitative vs. qualitative comparison and definition of generalizability: ‘The process of making statements about the general population on the basis of relevant research (e.g., experiments or surveys).’ (pg. 265)

Qualitative researchers tend to accept that their findings cannot be generalized in this way: instead generalizability is sacrificed in favor of a more detailed understanding of the issue being researched (pg. 266).

Guba (1981):  qualitative researchers could replace this with what he called transferability where findings within one context can be applied to another if there is sufficient knowledge of the contexts in question (pg. 266).

To Edwards and Potter, social action refers to the interactional accomplishment that a piece of discourse brings about.  This may be, for example, the action of remembering, blaming, performing prejudice, or any other outcome of social interaction (pg. 267).

To conclude, where it has been widely accepted that discursive psychological findings are not generalizable, I have shown that a discursive strategy can be generalizable to the extent that the ‘action’ that it accomplishes can be generalized across contexts (pg. 273).

Antaki, C., Billig, M., Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (2003).  “Discourse analysis means doing analysis: A critique of six analytic shortcomings.” Discourse Analysis Online, 1. Available from: <http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a1/antaki2002002-paper.html>.

‘Discourse analysis still can be misunderstood by those who have been schooled in quantitative analysis.  It might appear to quantitative researchers that ‘anything goes’ in qualitative work in general, and discourse analysis in particular.’

-Problems: researchers self-education, work produced embodies basic problems

“Writers are not doing analysis if they summarize, it they take sides, it they parade quotes, or if they simply spot in their data features of talk or text that are already well-known.  Nor are they doing analysis if their discovery of discourses, or mental constructs, is circular, or if they unconsciously treat their findings as surveys.”

‘It is safe to say that analysis means a close engagement with one’s text or transcripts, and the illumination of their meaning and significance through insightful and technically sophisticated work.  In a word, Discourse Analysis means Doing Analysis.

Golato Notes…

-purport actual language use: the forms and formats of a compliment response, the comparison of compliment responses in different languages (pg. 91)

-‘My results suggest caution in using DCTs if one’s goal is to describe actual language use (pg. 91).

-administrative advantages of DCTs…researchers can better control variables, quickly gather large amounts of data without transcription, better ability to compare native and non-native speakers (pg. 92)

Goodman Notes…

Definitions:

-Validity: showing what it is claiming to show

-Construct Validity: show that the effect demonstrated can be generalized from the measures used in the study to the fuller construct

-External Validity: being able to generalize the research findings to the population in general

-Ecological Validity: the extent to which the research findings can be generalized to other settings

-Population Validity: the extent to which the research findings from the sample studied to the wider population

-Reliability: the extent to which a given finding will be consistently reproduced where it is deemed that similar results will be consistently found from the same research study (pg. 265-266)

-best known example of a generalizable conversational strategy is that of the three-part list, where lists are consistently seen to include three items to show that the list is complete, and that what is been described is normative (pg. 268)

The analyst should be able to state that the following is true in order to make a claim of generalizability:

1)   A discursive strategy can be shown to achieve a certain rhetorical accomplishment.

2)   This strategy can be identified as being used in a range of conversational settings in an attempt to bring about this rhetorical accomplishment.

3)   If this strategy often brings about the same accomplishment this strategy can be described as a successful strategy.

4)   It can be shown that successful strategies will be used by a range of speakers in a range of contexts to bring about the same rhetorical end.  To this extent, it is a generalizable example of an action performed by a rhetorical strategy.

5)   We may eventually begin to see opposition to successful and generally used strategies (pg. 272).

Antaki et al…

Qualitative/Quantitative: Both want to do something with the data.  Neither is content merely to lay the data out flat.

Transcription prepares the data for analysis.  However, it is not the analysis itself.

Hutchby & Wooffit Revisited…

The most central of these assumptions is that ordinary talk is a highly organized, socially ordered phenomenon (pg. 11).

At the most basic level, conversation analysis is the study of talk.  It is the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction, talk-in-interaction (pg. 11).

One aim of CA therefore is to reveal this sequential order...describable ways in which turns are linked together into definite sequences (pg.42).

The next-turn is the place where speakers display their understanding of the prior turn’s possible completion. The next speaker has performed on the typed of utterance the prior speaker has produced (pg.42).

‘Paired Action Sequences that conventionally come in pairs:  questions-answers, greetings-return greetings, invitations-acceptance/declinations (pg.42)

The format for agreements is labeled the ‘preferred’ action turn shape and the disagreement format is called the ‘dispreferred’ action turn shape (pg. 46).

‘dispreference markers’: turns that is some way depart from what seems to be expected incorporate a variety of these, ‘well’ or ‘um’ (pg. 47)

Preferred actions are characteristically performed straightforward and without delay, while dispreferred actions are delayed, qualified and accounted for.  The concept refers to these structural features of turn-design and not to individual motivations or psychological dispositions (pg. 47).

Organization of Turn-Taking:

1)   turn-taking has occurs

2)   one speaker tends to talk at a time

3)   turns are taken with as little gap or overlap between them as possible (pg. 49.

Overlapping talk may be considered evidence of an incoming speaker’s failure to take notice of whether the current speaker is or is not finished (pg. 54).

Four varieties of repair sequences:

1)   Self-initiated self-repair: repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source.

2)   Other-initiated self-repair: Repair is carried out by speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient.

3)   Self-initiated other-repair: The speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble—for instance if a name is proving troublesome to remember.

4)   Other-initiated other-repair: The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and carries out the repair.  This is closest to what is conventionally understood as ‘correction’ (pg. 60).

The first two places in which repair can occur are within, or immediately after, the turn construction unit containing the trouble source (pg. 62).

The second place in which repair can be done occurs immediately at the next transition relevance place after the trouble source (pg. 63).

CA also focuses on:

Gaps and pauses

Breathiness

Talk in Institutional Settings

Turn-type pre-allocation means that participants are normatively constrained in the types of turns they may make according to their particular institutional roles. Typically, the format involves chains of question-answer sequences, in which the institutional figures ask the questions and the witness, pupil, or interviewee is expected to provide the answers.  This format is oriented to by participants, but at the same time normative rules operate which mean that participants can be sanctioned if they refuse to stay within the boundaries of the question-answer framework (pg. 141).

A three-part list is simply a way of packaging a point or position in an argument using a list of three separate items (pg. 183). 

A contrastive device is means of packaging a point, where one argument or approach is contrasted with another in such a way that the speaker’s favoured position is seen to be superior (pg. 183).

While CA aims to describe the ways that participants display that they are aware of specific contextual factors (by observably modifying the ways that they talk, for instance), CDA maintains that there are other factors, external to the situation the speakers are in, and of which the speakers may not be aware, that impact on the production of their talk (pg. 210).