Discursive approaches

Question 1

What is the discursive approach

Answer 1

• A qualitative research method that involves Looking at use of language – to gain insight into social construction of meaning – what is available to the narrator?

Question 2

Three discursive approaches

Answer 2

I. Discourse analysis
 provides ways of thinking about the role of discourse in constructing realities
II. Foucauldian discourse analysis
III. Narrative analysis
 looks at the stories individuals construct to make meaning of events and themselves

Question 3

What is discourse analysis?

Answer 3

• Asks: How do people use language to construct reality?
• Language as a social action not a mirror on the world
• Discourse analysis identifies power dynamics by asking ‘what is this text doing?’
• World is constructed through language
• Language performs a function – what people say tells us about what they are doing
• Self and others constructed at the sites of language interaction
• How do people use language and communication in social interaction?
• Participants have a stake in conversation
• 3 principle components of discourse analysis
1) Function/Action
 We do things with language: persuade, request, accuse, blame etc
2) Construction
 We use language to construct versions of the social world
3) Variability
 Accounts vary according to function

Question 4

What is foucauldian discourse analysis?

Answer 4

• Asks: What is the role of language in how people construct subjects and objects in their social and psychological lives?
• What discourses are available to these participants? What are the implications of this?
• Is concerned with discursive resources
• Explores the role of discourse in constructing social and psychological realities
• Explores the relationship between discourse and power
• Speaker is positioned by/within discourse
o Discourse constructs subjectivity so constrains what can be said, done and felt by individuals
o A subjects position within a discourse identifies a location for persons within the structure of rights and duties for those that use that repertoire
o Positions are different to roles because they are not prescriptive and have consequences for subjectivity
• Interpretative repertoires
o Ways of speaking : metaphors, figures of speech, grammatical and linguistic styles

Question 5

What is narrative analysis?

Answer 5

• Narrative analysis
• Asks: How do people construct stories to make sense of their experiences?
• Narrative analysis looks at the stories individual construct to make meaning of events and themselves
• Definition I found online: ‘Study participants are asked in long interviews to give a detailed account of them and their story rather than to answer a predetermined list of questions.’
• Constructionist perspective - How a story is told is as important as the words used to tell it. Emphasis is on participants’ experience.
• Different models of narrative analysis have varying emphasis on content, context and form of the narrative (e.g. The transition to second-time motherhood (Frost 2009))
• Increasingly find all three included in order to gain as rich an insight as possible

Question 6

Labov and Waletzky formal model of narrative

Answer 6

 Narratives have 6 sections:
 Abstract: Summarises the point of the story. Answers the question ‘what was this about?’
 Orientation: Identifies the time, place, situations, persons and activities (when, where, what who)
 Complicating action: Backbone of the narrative. Builds up to the story’s one or more peak points. Answers the question ‘then what happened?’
 Evaluation: Narrator indicates the point of the narrative, expresses why it is felt to be a ‘tellable’ story (i.e. why it deserves to be told and receive social attention). Answers the question ‘so what?’
 Result: What finally happened?
 Coda: Return to present. ‘So now…’
 A document that explains some of this http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/FebOralNarPE.pdf

Question 7

Informal models of narrative

Answer 7

o All investigate how dominant discourses shape the narrating of and listening to stories
o Challenges the conventions of story telling as being ‘beginning, middle and end’ stories may have unspoken endings due to shared knowledge assumptions
o Again there isn’t much info about this online at all, but from what I understand the informal approach is just listening to/reading someone’s story and interpreting what you think the important themes are, with no formal structure to your method of analysis. That’s a bit of guess work though.