Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences: Narrative, Conversation and Discourse Strategies

395 Pages·2015·1.73 MB·English

by  Katherine Bischoping

Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences

Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences
Narrative, Conversation and Discourse Strategies
Katherine Bischoping
Amber Gazso
To our students
Table of Contents
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Why You Should Read This Book
Why Talk Data? Why These Three Strategies?
Our Approach
Part I ANALYZING NARRATIVES
2 Broad Strokes Approaches to Narrative Analysis
Knowing the Past through Oral History
Knowing the Present through Oral History
Studying the Processes of the Life Course
Studying the Self as Essence or as Narrative Process
Chapter Summary
3 Fine-grained Analyses of Meaning
Analyzing Emplotment, Up Close
Discerning the Language of Agency
Observing Uses of Imagery and Figurative Language
Listening to the Sounds of Stories
Chapter Summary
4 The Interview in Narrative Analysis
Being Reflexive about Standpoint and Representation
Being Reflexive about Embodiment
Being Reflexive about Notions of a ‘Good’ Story
Chapter Summary
Part II Analyzing Talk-In-Interaction
5 The Basics of Conversation Analysis
The Founding Insight of Conversation Analysis
Understanding the Conversation Analysis Paradigm
Analyzing the Mechanisms of Everyday Talk
Chapter Summary
6 Conversation Analysis Approaches to Social Categories
Introducing Membership Categorization Analysis
CA and Categories: Debating the Alternatives
Chapter Summary
7 Institutional Talk-in-interaction
Learning the Basics of Institutional Talk-in-interaction
Analyzing How Institutional Work Gets Done in Stages
Studying Turn-taking within Institutions
Analyzing Other Mechanisms of Institutional Talk
Chapter Summary
8 The Interview in Conversation Analysis
Pinning Down the Qualitative Research Interview
Asking What Talk about Categories Accomplishes
Studying Focus Groups through a CA Lens
Chapter Summary
Part III Analyzing Discourse
9 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
Introducing Foucault
Unpacking Power, Knowledge, and the Subject
Doing Foucauldian DA
Chapter Summary
10 Critical Discourse Analysis
Understanding the Principles of CDA
Doing CDA
Chapter Summary
11 Garden-variety Discourse Analysis
Understanding the Discourse–Society Dialectic
Unraveling Identities and Subjectivities
Analyzing Power and Discourse
Working with Time
Chapter Summary
12 The Interview in Discourse Analysis
Being Reflexive about Power in DA
Being Reflexive about Performativity and Performance
Being Reflexive about Positioning
Chapter Summary
13 Conclusion
Now That You’ve Read This Book
What You’ve Learned about Talk
Remember Those Scenarios?
Why You Should Close This Book
References
Index
About the Authors
Katherine Bischoping
(PhD, University of Michigan) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at
York University. Her intellectual trajectory from statistics to applied survey
research, and then to qualitative approaches in sociology and beyond,
including poetry and playwriting, has been informed by her abiding
fascination with research methods. Katherine’s projects examine the
behind-the-scenes work of methodologists, the role of narration and
memory in oral history methods, gendered discourses in cultural narratives,
and cultural work and workers. She has been published in such journals as
Public Opinion Quarterly, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, American
Journal of Political Science, Canadian Review of Sociology and
Anthropology, and Sex Roles.
Amber Gazso
(PhD, University of Alberta) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York
University. Her main areas of research interest include: citizenship; family
and gender relations; research methods; poverty; and the welfare state.
Much of her research explores family members’ relationships with social
policies of the neo-liberal welfare state and has been published in such
journals as the Canadian Journal of Sociology, Citizenship Studies, Journal
of Family Relations, Journal of Family Issues, and the International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Amber works comfortably with a
mixed methods approach (quantitative and qualitative) in her research but
has shifted to greater application of qualitative methods more recently. This
first book, in some ways a consolidation of her knowledge of qualitative
analysis, has deepened her interest in this field of study.
About The Companion Website
We could not have written this book without the feedback provided by
colleagues from York University and other universities who were willing to be
readers for us. We are incredibly grateful for your time and expertise. You
include Jeffrey Aguinaldo, Renee Anspach, Greg Bird, Matthew Clark, Susan
Ehrlich, Laura Funk, Susan Levesque, Ryan McVeigh, Carmela Murdocca,
Riley Olstead, and Roberto Perin. We also thank Logan Donaldson and
Elizabeth Quinlan for permitting us to use excerpts from their data.
We also could not have written it without our graduate students, who read whole
or partial chapters or simply talked with us about some dilemma we faced as we
were writing. We particularly thank Kritee Ahmed, Bojan Bac´a, Krista
Banasiak, Megan Butryn, Selom Chapman-Nyaho, Ian Davidson, Julianne
DiSanto, Erkan Ercel, Zhipeng Gao, Markus Gerke, Duygu Gül Kaya, Caitlin
Janzen, Azar Masoumi, Shihoko Nakagawa, Marc Sinclair, Gökbörü Tanyıldız,
and Jason Webb, as well as students in our graduate courses in Interviewing
Methods and Qualitative Methods. For meeting the challenges of research
assistance and support, we thank Rawan Abdelbaki, Daniel Blais, Angelina
Duhig, and Adam King.
We thank the team at SAGE for believing in this project. We thank our family
and friends who encouraged and inspired us. Our final thank-yous are for the
places that made the writing easier. The New York Public Library reminded us
of Patience & Fortitude, Lake Simcoe and Sir Winston Churchill Park brought
us respite and perspective, and the tree window that Michael built framed our
writing with the changing of the seasons.
One Introduction
Why You Should Read this Book
Picture these scenarios:
1. As a graduate student, you’ve conducted 45 interviews. You have over
1000 pages of near verbatim transcripts of the interviews to analyze. You
panic when you look at these pages. You panic more when your supervisor
tells you that simply ‘coding your data for themes’ will not help you at your
defense or at the job talks you hope will follow.
2. As a researcher, you’ve encountered numerous challenges in recruiting the
30 participants you’ve planned for your study. Between timelines and
funding troubles, you’ve had to wrap up your data collection with only 12
interviews completed. You now have talk data, but not enough for the kinds
of analytic strategies you’re used to. You don’t know what to do.
3. As a professor, you’re responsible for mentoring students to their successful
completion of their degrees. You have a meeting with a promising student
who has obtained ethics approval for videotaping marital counseling
sessions. When you ask him, ‘What method of analysis are you planning to
use?’, he says, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
4. One of your doctoral students intends to do research on understanding the
experience of surviving cancer. When you meet to discuss her research
proposal, she explains that she thought using a Foucauldian approach would
give her work cachet.
5. You’ve never been completely satisfied with how you’ve been analyzing
data. You do the same things you always do and, frankly, you’re bored.
You wonder how you might spice things up.
What would you do in each of these scenarios? Our answer is that you should
read this book. We wrote it for our advanced students and for researchers like us,
for those curious about how to use new approaches and for those who are
overwhelmed, exhausted, stuck, or confused and in need of help – quick help,
not the kind of help where you realize you’ll have to read hundreds of books and
articles to get some purchase on what your options are. We read for you, aiming
to pinpoint strategies you could find useful.