Analytic advice for the Doing of Discourse Analysis
Location
1048
Format Type
Event
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
January 2019
End Date
January 2019
Abstract
For the last 20 years, I have been a scholar deeply engaged with a variety of forms of Discourse Analysis (DA). Admittedly, the terrain and debates surrounding the method, theories, and assumptions of DA are varied and complex. The aim with this paper is not to further rehearse these metatheoretical issues, but to discuss several broad bits of analytic advice for doing DA that apply to a variety of discursive approaches. Advice of this kind has been offered elsewhere in piecemeal fashion (see Antaki,2003; Silverman, 2001; van Dijk, 1990). The aim here is to organize and critically reflect on a subset of these basic requirements as they have applied to my own and my student's analytic work. I will discuss the following 4 pieces of advice for doing systematic, rigorous, explicit, and analytically tractable DA: 1) analyzing discursive action rather than parading discursive excerpts that simply bolt on to discursive themes; 2) avoiding the use of colloquial prose summaries of data; 3) identifying patterns in talk rather than feature spotting; 4) using performative language rather than psychologizing. These four bits of analytic advice will be illustrated with segments of data. The goal is to help encourage solid DA work and to guard against both the dangers of 'ascriptivism' (making analytic claims that do not bind to the data) and the broader claim from the outside that, in qualitative work, 'anything goes'.
Keywords
discourse analysis, qualitative, rigor
Analytic advice for the Doing of Discourse Analysis
1048
For the last 20 years, I have been a scholar deeply engaged with a variety of forms of Discourse Analysis (DA). Admittedly, the terrain and debates surrounding the method, theories, and assumptions of DA are varied and complex. The aim with this paper is not to further rehearse these metatheoretical issues, but to discuss several broad bits of analytic advice for doing DA that apply to a variety of discursive approaches. Advice of this kind has been offered elsewhere in piecemeal fashion (see Antaki,2003; Silverman, 2001; van Dijk, 1990). The aim here is to organize and critically reflect on a subset of these basic requirements as they have applied to my own and my student's analytic work. I will discuss the following 4 pieces of advice for doing systematic, rigorous, explicit, and analytically tractable DA: 1) analyzing discursive action rather than parading discursive excerpts that simply bolt on to discursive themes; 2) avoiding the use of colloquial prose summaries of data; 3) identifying patterns in talk rather than feature spotting; 4) using performative language rather than psychologizing. These four bits of analytic advice will be illustrated with segments of data. The goal is to help encourage solid DA work and to guard against both the dangers of 'ascriptivism' (making analytic claims that do not bind to the data) and the broader claim from the outside that, in qualitative work, 'anything goes'.
Comments
Breakout Session A