Type Bryman

Alan author names here

Social Research Methods

Chapter 22: Language in
Qualitative research

Slides authored by Tom Owens

 Language and social research

• Knowing how words are used and the meanings

of specific terms in the local vernacular (or
`argot') is crucial to an appreciation of how the
social world being studied is viewed by its
members
• The two approaches examined here treat
language as their central focal point:
conversation analysis (CA) and discourse
analysis (DA)
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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 What is conversation analysis?

• Conversation analysis (CA) is the fine-grained

analysis of talk as it occurs in interaction in naturally
occurring situations.
• The talk is usually recorded and transcribed so that
the detailed analyses can be carried out.
• These analyses are concerned with uncovering the
underlying structures of talk in interaction and as such
with the achievement of order through interaction.

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Assumptions of CA

• Speech is seen as action that ‘does’ something

• Focus is on the ‘here-and-now’ context of talk
– avoid making extraneous inferences
• Heritage (1984, 1987)
– talk is structured by tacit rules
– talk is forged contextually
– analysis is grounded in data
– The specific details of conversational interaction
cannot be ignored

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Some basic tools of CA: 1

• Notational symbols
– We:ll - prolonged sound
– .hh - intake of breath
– (0.8) - silence for 0.8 seconds
• Turn-taking
• Adjacency pairs
– question and answer
– invitation and response

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Some basic tools of CA: 2

• Preference organization
– one response preferred to the other (e.g.
acceptance/refusal)
– dispreferred response has to be justified
• Accounts
– justifies action by reference to common values
• Repair mechanisms
– response to unexpected speech acts
– restores interaction to normal appearances

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 What is discourse analysis?

• All forms of linguistic communication

• Discourse is constitutive of the social world
– frames the way we perceive reality
– creates objects of knowledge
• Anti-realist epistemology
• Constructionist ontology
• What are people trying to accomplish when they use
particular discourses?

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Three basic discourse-analytic questions

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Four themes in discourse analysis

 Discourse is a topic, not just a resource

 Language is constructive
 Discourse is a form of action
 Rhetorically organized
 establishing one version of the world
in the face of competing versions

Gill (2000)

Thinking deeply 22.1

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Uncovering interpretative repertoires

• General resources used to construct discourse and

enable the performance of certain acts (Potter &
Wetherell, 1994)
• e.g. Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) found separate
empiricist and contingent repertoires of language used by
scientists, depending on whether they were presenting
their work in scientific papers or discussing it more
informally with the researchers.

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Producing facts

 Discourse analysts are interested in the ways that

allegedly factual knowledge is conveyed
 Potter et al (1991) studied the making of a television
documentary ‘Cancer: Your money or your life’
(Channel 4, April 1988)
 They used the following methods:
 Looking for rhetorical detail
 Use of variation as a lever
 Reading the detail
 Looking for statements of credibility
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 Cross-referencing discourse studies

Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Critical discourse analysis (CDA)

• CDA emphasizes the role of language as a power

resource that is related to ideology and socio-cultural
change
• CDA tries to reveal the meaning of a phenomenon by
asking:
– why something seems to mean something different now to
what it meant 40 years ago; how one discourse influences
another; how discourse is constructed through academic or
journal articles; how discourse makes certain activities
possible, desirable or inevitable;
– how some people use discourse to legitimate their positions
and actions
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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition

 Overview of Discourse Analysis

• More flexible than Conversation Analysis in looking

beyond immediate context of talk
• Growing in popularity
• Anti-realist position leads to a criticism of being too
abstract
• The term itself – ‘discourse analysis’ – may be too broad
to be meaningful
• Overall, understanding how language is used may be
crucial to understanding the social world

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Bryman: Social Research Methods, 4th edition