Disxursive Flashcards
Discursive action model
Edwards and Potter
Remembering as action
Dilemma of stake (interest, or bias)
Has to be managed rhetorically, to undermine alternative accounts
Stake management
How do people make themselves accountable for their statements
Typically, as objective, disinterested, neutral observers
Descriptions formulated to present speaker as ‘reasonable’
Liz Stokoe
Applies CA to talk about aspects of gender
Research on how neighbourhood disputes are resolved
CARM (Conversation Analytic Role-play Method)
Mick Billig
Advocates a focus on rhetoric
Attitudes as rhetorical positions in argument
Derek Edwards
Discourse and cognition (1997)
Re-examines cognitive topics as social
Importance of ‘script formulations’
Talk is not a ‘window on the mind’
Jonathon Potter
Representing reality (1996)
Application of social constructionist ideas to psychology
Critic of interview-based research
advocating the use of ‘naturally occurring data’
Is memory cognitive (discursive)
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)
Script theory
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
Edwards (1994): unscripted items
Breaches in a script sequence.
Produce more conversation about the breach.
Person breaching seen as immoral
Complaining (Edwards, 2005)
Complaints need to be seen as objective
Easy to dismiss if seen as dispositional
Accounts formulated to avoid this
Formulating noise
Stokoe and Hepburn
In the absence of decibel measures, complaints about neighbours present noise as:
- Breaches of social conduct
- Meaningful
- Unreasonable
Tajfel and Wilkes (1963): A&B lines task (discursive)
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
Antaki, Condor & Levine (1996) identity as discursive resource
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
Semiotics
Study of signs and advertising
Visual rhetoric
Michel Foucault
Discourse restricts our thinking (e.g., truth claims in science)
Therefore, science is ‘a discourse’
Ian Parker
Critical of Loughborough school
Discourses as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.
Foucauldian discourse analysis
works primarily with texts
Can include visual images
Gillies (1999): women smokers
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)
Discursive Implications for health psychology
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’)
Identity in discourse
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
Identity and autism
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
Looping effects
Ian Hacking
Argues that labels, such as autism influence those individuals and everyone else around them
These are the looping effects of categories
