chapter shifts to exploring how documents and texts are created, used and spoken for in various contexts. It focuses on how documents, and other ‘non-human things’ (like pens or computers), co-ordinate and produce people’s actions and interactions. Through three case studies, I extend the prior chapter’s discussion on how to study talk, and outline how a detailed analysis of moments of talk can say something about the ‘big’ structures and institutions of social life.
Chapter 8 outlines some of the dilemmas that you can face when you study conversations and discourse. I outline the debates around such topics as how best to understand and work with interview or focus group data: what is your role in making claims about what is going on in your data; and what can a detailed analysis of talk say about things like ‘power’? Chapter 9 then focuses on the analysis of ‘texts’ or ‘documents’. Through a range of examples and case studies, I offer you some potential ways to engage with different varieties of texts. The chapter begins with an example of a detailed analysis of a couple of lines from a newspaper dating advertisement and ends with a discussion of some documents ranging over a 50-year period. The aim of this chapter is to give you access to a range of questions and tactics you might want to adopt when engaging with texts.
The closing chapter offers a broad overview on how to code and analyze all types of discursive materials. It draws together approaches to questioning the quality of analysis. I also outline some main ‘stepping-stones’ when undertaking this style of work, a list of things you may want to consider in relation to how you undertake your own work. In each chapter, the emphasis is on the practicalities of doing such work. I have tried to ground my discussion in a range of – hopefully interesting – empirical examples of how people have actually generated, worked on and theorized with different research materials. Importantly, in writing this book I am not seeking to offer you a set of specific criteria that ‘must’ be followed, but rather I have tried to suggest a range of approaches, techniques and practices that should help you begin to engage with and undertake discursive work.
Key points
Language, written or spoken, is never treated as a neutral, transparent, means of communication. Instead, language is understood as performative and functional.
People studying discourse are interested in how language is used in certain contexts. The focus is on how specific identities, practices, knowledges or meanings are produced by describing something in just that way over another way.
Our understanding of things, concepts or ideas that we might take for granted are not somehow natural or pre-given, but rather the product of human actions and interactions, human history, society and culture.
Further reading
The following works go into more detail about the issues mentioned in this chapter:
Burr, V. (2015) Social Constructionism. London: Routledge.
Potter, J. (1996) ‘Discourse analysis and constructionist approaches: theoretical background’, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences. Leicester: BPS, pp. 125–40.
Wetherell, M. (2001) ‘Themes in discourse research: the case of Diana’, in M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S.J. Yates (eds), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader. London: Sage, in association with The Open University, pp. 14–28.
Chapter Two Generating an archive
Contents
Sources of ‘data’ 10
Document-based sources 12
Audio- and visual-based sources 19
Some closing comments 24
Chapter objectives
After reading this chapter, you should know:
how to generate your research archive – the data that you will find yourself working with on a day-to-day basis;
about some potential sources of materials you may want to consider working with, ranging from newspaper articles to blogs to recordings of counselling sessions; and
about some examples of how I and other researchers found, collected and analyzed various materials.
The range of possible sources of material to conduct research on is massive and potentially never-ending. We now have a large range of different technologies that allow you to generate, access, store and engage with a vast array of materials. Among many things, the technologies of the printing press, camera, photocopier, audio recorder, video camera, computer, smartphone and the Internet are all key to contemporary research practice. These mundane and relatively invisible technologies both enable us to conduct our research and, perhaps more importantly, now direct the focus of our research.
Sources of ‘data’
To put it very simply, we could divide your possible sources of ‘data’ into two categories: data that you have to generate and data that already exists. By that I mean to contrast, say, a research interview you conduct on the topic of genetic disease with, say, a newspaper article on genetic disease. The newspaper article, on the face of it, exists independently of your action whereas the research interview exists only due to your action. So we could divide the potential sources of data into these two categories: researcher-generated and already existing data. However, this assumes that you are somehow more ‘active’ with the former category and reasonably ‘passive’ or ‘neutral’ in relation to the latter. In both cases your actions are utterly central in producing the materials as ‘data’. In both cases you have to actually discover it, physically collect it, make decisions about what materials you are going to gather and what materials you are going to ignore. Irrespective of the actual form of the materials – video recordings of television programmes, audio files of focus groups, newspaper articles, screen shots of web discussion groups or photocopies of academic journal articles – you have made certain choices. Importantly, you have decided to call this specific ensemble of materials, which you collected together, your ‘data’.
So where does that leave us? In reports of research, some things are named as ‘data’ and some activities are named as ‘data collection’; other things and activities do not hold the same status. In one project I worked on, the two ‘official’ sources of data were:
video recordings of doctor–patient consultations about a specific condition; and
audio files of research interviews with patients about the consultation.
However, the findings of the research are also the product of the engagement with the following materials:
Transcripts of the doctor–patient interactions and research interviews.
Handwritten and typed field notes of what happened prior to, during and after the consultations and interviews.
Field notes, audio files and minutes of the research team’s meetings and other related activities.
Official documents distributed by the research team (including patient information leaflets, consent forms, funding documents and research reports).
Academic research papers and books (covering such topics as social scientists writing about doctor–patient interactions; medical researchers and ethicists writing about a specific medical condition and doctor–patient interactions; and social scientific and scientific research methodology texts).
Leaflets, handouts and newspaper cuttings (covering a specific medical condition).