Disxursive

Question 1

Discursive action model

Answer 1

Edwards and Potter

Remembering as action

Dilemma of stake (interest, or bias)

Has to be managed rhetorically, to undermine alternative accounts

Question 2

Stake management

Answer 2

How do people make themselves accountable for their statements

Typically, as objective, disinterested, neutral observers

Descriptions formulated to present speaker as ‘reasonable’

Question 3

Liz Stokoe

Answer 3

Applies CA to talk about aspects of gender

Research on how neighbourhood disputes are resolved

CARM (Conversation Analytic Role-play Method)

Question 4

Mick Billig

Answer 4

Advocates a focus on rhetoric

Attitudes as rhetorical positions in argument

Question 5

Derek Edwards

Answer 5

Discourse and cognition (1997)

Re-examines cognitive topics as social

Importance of ‘script formulations’

Talk is not a ‘window on the mind’

Question 6

Jonathon Potter

Answer 6

Representing reality (1996)

Application of social constructionist ideas to psychology

Critic of interview-based research

advocating the use of ‘naturally occurring data’

Question 7

Is memory cognitive (discursive)

Answer 7

Only if we think in terms of memory as ‘test performance’

Real life memory often discursive

Not simply private/public distinction (even private remembering has inner speech)

Question 8

Script theory

Answer 8

Schank & Abelson, 1977

routine actions represented as predictable sequence of events

But how many elements can a stereotypical script handle? Often only appear as ‘breaches’

In everyday talk, scripts serve a rhetorical function, to make sense of the world

Question 9

Edwards (1994): unscripted items

Answer 9

Breaches in a script sequence.

Produce more conversation about the breach.

Person breaching seen as immoral

Question 10

Complaining (Edwards, 2005)

Answer 10

Complaints need to be seen as objective

Easy to dismiss if seen as dispositional

Accounts formulated to avoid this

Question 11

Formulating noise

Answer 11

Stokoe and Hepburn

In the absence of decibel measures, complaints about neighbours present noise as:

• Breaches of social conduct
• Meaningful
• Unreasonable

Question 12

Tajfel and Wilkes (1963): A&B lines task (discursive)

Answer 12

Categorisation as cognitive ‘short cut’ (hence its role in Tajfel’s theory of prejudice)

Most groups in social psychology are identified by the researcher

Potter & Wetherell (1987): need to explore the use of categories in discourse

Question 13

Antaki, Condor & Levine (1996) identity as discursive resource

Answer 13

Critique of SIT

Identity flexible not fixed

Depends on context: who, when, where

Study of three friends in conversation: a doctor, a teacher and a lecturer

Charly qualified as a doctor. His membership of the ‘doctor’ group fluctuates throughout the interview

Question 14

Semiotics

Answer 14

Study of signs and advertising

Visual rhetoric

Question 15

Michel Foucault

Answer 15

Discourse restricts our thinking (e.g., truth claims in science)

Therefore, science is ‘a discourse’

Question 16

Ian Parker

Answer 16

Critical of Loughborough school

Discourses as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.

Question 17

Foucauldian discourse analysis

Answer 17

works primarily with texts

Can include visual images

Question 18

Gillies (1999): women smokers

Answer 18

Interview study

Examined discursive positions of women who smoke

Focus on meaning and significance of smoking

Key discourses:
•Addiction
•Control and self-regulation
•Agency (choice)

Question 19

Discursive Implications for health psychology

Answer 19

Discourse of addiction used in health promotion as scare tactic, but Gillies’s interviewees used it to justify continuing smoking

Important role of moral accountability

Use of medical discourse to claim that smoking is actually good for you (‘stress therapy’)

Question 20

Identity in discourse

Answer 20

Ways of talking about the world also shape the way we understand ourselves

Idea of discourse as cultural resources that we can use to construct identity

Gender as performance (Butler, 1990)

‘Homosexual’: from adjective to noun

Question 21

Identity and autism

Answer 21

Neuroscience provides a vocabulary that can be used to inform opposing positions

Use by advocates as possessing certain qualities, treatment as abuse

Used in health to construct as ‘lifelong disability. Treatment as unnecessary and expensive

Question 22

Looping effects

Answer 22

Ian Hacking

Argues that labels, such as autism influence those individuals and everyone else around them

These are the looping effects of categories