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Citation: POTTER, J., 1996. Discourse analysis and constructionist ap-

proaches: theoretical background. IN: Richardson, J.T.E. (ed). Handbook of

Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences. Leicester:

British Psychological Society, pp. 125 - 140

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 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND CONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACHES:
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Jonathan Potter
Discourse and Rhetoric Group

Department of Social Sciences

Loughborough University

Loughborough

Leics. LE11 3TU,

Tel: 0509 223384

Fax: 0509 238277

Email: [email protected]

In : John T.E. Richardson (Ed.)(1996). Handbook of qualitative research methods for

psychology and the social sciences. Leicester; BPS Books.

19 March, 2012

1
This chapter is structured in terms of questions and answers. There are several reasons for

adopting this format. First, people often consult a handbook to find the answers to questions

so the format may simplify this task. Second, most constructionist approaches place a

considerable emphasis on dialogueand question-answer sequences are dialogue in one of its

most prototypical forms. Third, constructionist researchers have been at the forefront of

moves to rethink the literary forms in which social science is presented.

I shall start with some general questions about constructionism and its place in psychology,

and then I shall move on to focus on issues of method and analysis. I shall concentrate upon

general principles and arguments, however, this is not intended to be a how-to-do-it chapter.

Chapter 11, by Rosalind Gill, provides a more fleshed out example of a particular style of

constructionist research.

What is constructionism?

On the face of it this seems like a sensible question with which to start. What could be wrong

with give a broad characterisation, offering a compact definition, and then going on to

describe constructionism in detail? The problem is that this would be a profoundly anti-

constructionist approach to this question. It would imply that there is a simple thing —

constructionism that can be neutrally and objectively described and defined. This would be a

realist account of constructionism. That is, it would do precisely the thing that

constructionism rejects. Instead of seeing constructionism as a simple describable thing,

another approach would be to consider the way constructionism is itself constructed: how it is

described differently, perhaps, in methods handbooks or theoretical overviews, by

psychologists and sociologists; how different perspectives are treated as constructionist, and

what is taken to hang on this ascription. However, I do not intent to attempt this ambitious

enterprise here.

2
Having cautioned against treating definitions realistically, they can nevertheless be a useful

ladder to better understanding. Here is a definition of social constructionism from John

Shotter and Ken Gergen’s important series of books with a constructionist theme:

[Social constructionism] has given voice to range of new topics, such as the social

construction of personal identities; the role of power in the social making of

meanings; rhetoric and narrative in establishing sciences; the centrality of everyday

activities; remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities; reflexivity in

method and theorizing. The common thread underlying all these topics is a concern

with the processes by which human abilities, experiences, commonsense and scientific

knowledge are both produced in, and reproduce, human communities (Shotter and

Gergen, 1994: p. i).

The quote implies a unity, but listing also shows mix and match of different theoretical

perspectives.

Elsewhere Ken Gergen (1994) identifies five basic assumptions for a social constructionist

science:

1. The terms by which we account for the world and ourselves are not dictated by the

stipulted objects of such accounts. (1994: 49)

2. The terms and forms by which we achieve understanding of the world and ourselves are

social artifacts, products of historically and culturally situated interchanges among

people. (1994: 49)

3. The degree to which a given account of the world or self is sustained across time is not

dependent on the objective validity of the account but on the vicissitudes of social process.

(1994:51)

4. Language dervies its significance in human affairs from the way in which it functions

within patterns of relationship. (1994: 52)

5. To appraise existing forms of discourse is to evaluate patterns of cultural life; such

evaluations give voice to other cultural enclaves. (1994: 53)

3
Another way to come at the question is not to attempt a definition, but to consider the

different approaches that have been commonly called constructionist (with the warning that

‘commonly called’ hides a range of complications).

What approaches have been called constructionist?

One of the features of the approaches that have been called constructionist is that they often

have often developed at the margins of disciplines, in the spaces where psychology blurs into

sociology, where literary studies borders on political science, where feminism and rhetoric

intersect. A rather cursory survey of constructionist approaches can easily gather together a

dozen perspectives (see Table One). Note, however, that there are all sorts of potentially

contentious features of this list and its absences. Reviewing literature is itself a constructive

and sometimes highly contentious business (Ashmore, et. al., 1995); what should count as an

approach? and what is its defining reference?

Table One: Varied Constructionist Approaches

Approach Example

Conversation analysis Atkinson and Heritage (1984a)

Discourse analysis Potter and Wetherell (1987)

Ethnomethodology Button (1991)

Ethogenics Harré (1992)

Feminist studies Radke and Stam (1994)

Post-structuralism Culler (1983), Hollway (1989)

Postmodern political science Der Derian and Shapiro (1989)

Rhetoric Billig (1987)

Reflexive ethnography Clifford and Marcus (1986)

Sociology of scientific knowledge Latour and Woolgar (1986)

Socio-cultural Psychology Wertsch (1991)

4
 Symbolic Interactionism Hewitt (1994)

Some of these approaches — such as ethogenics — are developments specifically from

within or directed at psychology. Others — such as postmodern political science — have

been carried on in almost complete isolation from the problematics of psychology. Several of

these perspectives have some psychological adherents, but have their main site of

development outside the disciplinary boundaries of psychology.

Is there an underlying unity to these approaches?

Having identified these approaches as constructionist it might seem straightforward to

identify features that they share in common. Yet it is hard to find a single characteristic

central to them all. The idea of a family resemblance gives something of a sense of the

pattern. First, they all tend to be oppositional movements of one kind or another to traditional

social science positions, and in particular their realist assumptions. Second, they all tend to

stress the way mind and action are contingent on specific cultural forms. They see minds as

not having fixed essences but being built from the symbolic resources of a cultures; indeed, in

some constructionisms mind is not a mental entity at all, but a discursive move: a set of

stories that people tell, or different discursive practices for dealing with one another as moral

and accountable (cf. Harré, 1983; Coulter, 1989). Third, they all tend to treat discourse —

variously theorized — as the central organizing principle of construction.

What does this mean for traditional institutional boundaries?

Clearly constructionism cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In many cases current

boundaries are a product of particular views of the social and human sciences that were

established during university expansion after the Second World War, particularly in the US

and UK. Lack of expansion in the late 70s and 80s during the proliferation of constructionist

approaches has meant that there is often a disparity between the intellectual and bureaucratic

5
structure of departments. Constructionist researchers in psychology often have more in

common with colleagues in areas of linguistics or sociology of science than they do with their

colleagues who study ganglion sprouting or the ergonomics of car dashboards.

One of the challenges for constructionists is to be able to thrive in the traditional structures

while operating in a genuinely interdisciplinary manner. This can cut both ways — at times it

can be a struggle to establish to legitimacy of this kind of research with more mainstream

psychological colleagues; yet at other times it can be a context that allows superficial

theorizing and loose analysis.

Is constructionism the same as social constructionism and constructivism?

In psychology work has normally proceeded under the title social constructionism with

concern being expressed that social constructivism could be confused with the artistic

movement known as constructivism (Gergen, 1985). In contrast, in sociology of scientific

knowledge constructivism is a well established perspective (with no concern about the artistic

movement), but constructivism (without the social) is increasingly favoured over social

constructionism (cf. Latour and Woolgar, 1979, 1986). One reason for this is that social

construction is associated here with rather limited perspectives which relate knowledge to

scientists’ social background and group allegiances. However, sociological constructionists

often see such accounts as reductive (Mulkay, 1979; Woolgar, 1988). Moreover, they may

want to make recourse to processes in texts and rhetoric which are not social in this more

traditional way (Knorr-Cetina, 1995). More radically, they have started to question the

coherence of the very distinction between the social and non-social (Latour, 1987).

Is there something that could be called a constructionist method?

The short answer to this is no. If anything there is even more variation of method than of

theory. For many of these approaches it is not clear that there is anything which would

6
correspond to what psychologists traditionally think of as a method. Perhaps the most

appropriate consideration in many cases would be what Billig (1988a) calls scholarship. That

is, lack of method in the sense of a formally specified set of procedures and calculations, does

not mean a lack of argument or rigour; nor does it mean that the theoretical system is not

guiding analysis in various ways.

* * *

For the rest of this chapter, I want to concentrate on discourse analysis which is an approach

where it makes more sense to talk about research method. Although even here method is

understood very differently than is normal in psychology. For example, one point of contrast

is in the justification of ‘results’. In much traditional psychological work, justification is

provided by carrying out the procedure of analysis correctly and fully. A sample is collected,

some ‘variables’ operationalized, conventional statistical tests are carried out, and so on. In

contrast, in discourse analysis, the analytic procedure is largely separate from how claims are

justified.

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis focuses on talk and texts as social practices, and on the resources that are

drawn on to enable those practices. For example, discourse analytic studies of racism have

been concerned with the way descriptions are marshalled in particular contexts to legitimate

the blaming of a minority group (Potter and Wetherell, 1988), and with the resources

(‘interpretative repertoires’) that are available in a particular cultural setting for legitimating

racist practices (Nairn and McCreanor, 1991; Wetherell and Potter, 1992).

Discourse analysts have focused on issues of stake and accountability, looking at the way

people manage pervasive issues of blame and responsibility (Antaki, 1994; Edwards and

Potter, 1993; Gill, 1993) and have studied the way descriptions are put together to perform

7
actions and manage accountability (Potter, forthcoming). For example, Edwards (1994)

studied ‘script formulations’ in a set of telephone conversations, showing the way events

could be described to present them as regular and routine, to treat them as a characteristic

consequence of personal dispositions or, to make them out as an unusual result of outside

pressures. Such descriptions manage questions of fault and provide legitimation for courses

of action.

Discourse analysts have rejected the traditional cognitive explanations of psychology. Rather

than try and explain actions as a consequence of mental processes or entities, their interest has

been in how mentalist notions are constructed and used in interaction. For example, instead

of attempting to explain sexism, say, in terms of the attitudes of individuals, the concern is

with how evaluations are managed in particular interactions, and either linked up with, or

separated from, individuals (Gill, 1993; Wetherell, et al., 1987).

These are some of the characteristic strands of discourse work, but they do not define it. New

studies are being done, pushing back the limits of discourse work and the problematics of

discourse analysis are providing a new take on a range of psychological issues.

Does that mean there is a discourse analytic answer to any psychological question?

No. One of the mistakes that people sometimes make when they are starting discourse work

is to treat discourse analysis as a method that can simply be plugged in to a predefined

question: ‘I am interested in the factors that cause people to smoke, should I use an

observational study, an experimental simulation, or discourse analysis?’ What this misses is

that, first, discourse analysis is not just a method but is a whole perspective on social life and

its research, and, second, that all methods involve a range of theoretical assumptions.

Traditional psychology has often been concerned with factors and outcomes, and these ideas

are thoroughly enmeshed in thinking about experimentation and questionnaire design. The

8
logic of discourse analysis is a rhetorical and normative one. Any rhetorical move can have a

rhetorical counter move — categorization, say, can be countered by particularization (Billig,

1985). Effectiveness is not guaranteed as it should be a with a causal process; for a norm is

not a mechanical template. Norms are oriented to, but they are also regularly deviated from,

although such deviations may themselves be marked by a range of accounts or sanctions.

One of the skills involved in discourse analytic work is in formulating questions that are

theoretically coherent and analytically manageable. Simply importing a question cold from a

traditional psychological framework is asking for trouble.

Another important difference in the formulation of questions is that traditional psychologists

have become devoted to hypothetico deductivism, where quality research is seen to hang on a

well formed question or precisely specified hypothesis. Without endorsing a naive,

assumption free inductivism, discourse researchers have often found it productive to collect

and explore a set of materials — interview transcripts or natural records of some kind —

without being hampered by the need to start from a specific hypothesis. Indeed, the devotion

to a fully formulated prior hypothesis has probably been one of the reasons why psychologists

have been so reluctant to study records of natural interaction such as everyday conversations

between familiars or interactions in the workplace.

What are interpretative repertoires?

I noted above that discourse analysis is concerned both with the organization of texts and talk

in practices, and with the discursive resources that those practices draw on. The notion of

interpretative repertoires is intended primarily to help in specifying and analysing

interpretative resources. Interpretative repertories are systematically related sets of terms,

often used with stylistic and grammatical coherence, and often organized around one or more

central metaphors. They are historically developed and make up an important part of the

common sense of a culture; although some may be specific to certain institutional domains.

9
The idea of an interpretative repertoire is intended to accommodate to the twin considerations

that there are resources available with an off-the-shelf character that can be used in a range of

different settings to do particular tasks, and that these resources have a more bespoke

flexibility which allows them to be selectively drawn on and reworked according to the

setting. It is the attempt to accommodate to this flexible, local use that distinguishes

interpretative repertoires from the more Foucaultian notion of discourses (Parker, 1992;

Potter, et al., 1990). Participants will often draw on a number of different repertoires, flitting

between them as they construct the sense of a particular phenomenon, or as they perform

different actions. Billig (1992) refers to this as the kaleidoscope of common sense.

The classic research using this notion is Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) study of scientists

discourse, which records the way scientists use one interpretative repertoire in their formal

writing for justifying facts, and another in their informal talk when accounting for why

competing scientists were in error. More recently, the notion has been developed in a number

of studies with a more social psychological focus (e.g. Marshall and Raabe, 1993; Potter and

Reicher, 1987; Wetherell et al, 1987; Wetherell and Potter, 1992). The overall analytic goal

in these studies is the identification of repertories and the explication of the practices they are

part of. For methodological discussions relating to repertoire analysis see in particular Coyle

(1995), Potter and Wetherell (1987, ch. 7, forthcoming) and Wetherell and Potter (1992, ch.

4) and Wooffitt (1992a).

Although the notion of interpretative repertories has proved analytically fruitful, it has some

limitations. For example, it is much more difficult to make clear and consistent judgements

about the boundaries of particular repertories outside of constrained institutional settings such

as science discourse. Another problem is that the generality of the repertoire notion may

obscure local interactional business done by particular discourse forms (see Potter,

forthcoming; Wooffitt, 1992b).

10
Is repertoire analysis the main task of discourse analysis?

No. Although it has been one important development, it is increasingly supplemented or

replaced by studies of the way specific actions are accomplished, or of the devices and

procedures through which factual versions are constructed. These are studies asking the

following sorts of questions. How is a blaming achieved? How is a particular version of the

world made to seem solid and unproblematic? How are social categories constructed and

managed in practice? Such questions require an understanding of what Billig (1987) calls the

witcraft of rhetoric: the detailed, contextually sensitive manner in which versions are

constructed and arguments deployed as well as an appreciation of the conversational

organizations in which such procedures are embedded. Indeed, it is here that the study of

discourse shades both into the study of rhetoric and work on conversation analysis.

There is less written on methodological aspects of this style of discourse work. However,

Potter and Wetherell (1994) describe the methodological decisions and analytic practices in

one study of this kind, trying to show how specific conclusions were arrived at. Wooffitt

(1992a,b) also provides a clear an helpful introduction to such analysis.

How are discourse and conversation analysis similar and different?

Conversation analysis has developed from pioneering work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson

to provide an elaborate and systematic account of talk-in-interaction. It is sometimes crudely

stereotyped by psychologists as the study of the rules of turn taking in trivial conversations.

However, the point of conversation analysis is to explicate the fundamental sense that

interaction has for its participants. It is a fast growing and notably cumulative field which has

highlighted major deficiencies in the speech act approaches that psychologists often look to

for an account of language practices (Levinson, 1983; Schegloff, 1988) as well as providing

striking analyses of topics as diverse as intersubjectivity (Schegloff, 1992), public speaking

(Atkinson, 1984) and courtroom interaction (Drew, 1992).

11
Conversation analysis is relevant to discourse analysis in two ways. First, it provides a

powerful and general understanding of interaction that has the potential to illuminate a wide

range of research questions. After all, much human interaction is performed through

conversation and to understand many of the more psychological and social phenomena that

discourse analysts are interested in it is necessary to understand how they emerge out of the

general pragmatics of conversation. This involves being mindful of basic features such as

turn organization, pairing of actions, normative ranking of alternative turns, as well as

considering the findings of many studies showing the delicate way in which actions are

embedded in sequences of discourse. A basic practical understanding of CA is a prerequisite

for producing high class DA work. The best and most accessible current introduction is

undoubtedly Nofsinger (1991), although Heritage (1984) has an excellent chapter situating

CA in its ethnomethodological context (see also Heritage, 1988).

There are specific areas where discourse and conversation analysis come together. Like

discourse analysts, conversation analysts have paid a lot of attention to the way versions are

constructed and actions performed. One of the points argued by Sacks (1992) is that

interaction is not merely organized in its general forms, but is also organized in its particulars.

Any level of detail in talk — hesitations, repairs, pauses — can be crucial for a piece of

interaction; indeed, much of the business of interaction may be happening in the details.

Workers in this tradition have also developed a sophisticated critique of cognitivist

approaches to interaction, and at the same time attempted to identify grounds for making

inferences about cognitive entities (Coulter, 1989; Pomerantz, 1990/91). CA and DA are

starting to develop complementary alternatives to cognitivist theory.

Making conversational interaction a topic of study is also important for methodological

reasons. CA highlights a symmetry between the position of the participant and analyst in a

conversation. In conversations speaker provide their own ongoing interpretation of what is

going on. In most cases, a turn of talk is based upon and displays some sort of analysis of the

12
sense of the previous turn of talk. A turn may be responded to as a question, a criticism, an

invitation and so on — and in responding to it in this way the speaker displays their

understanding. And if the displayed understanding is faulty various repair mechanisms can

come into play in the next turn to sort things out. What this provides, then, is a way for the

analyst to use the participants’ own, situated, analyses to help check the adequacy of their

own analysts’ claims. The point is not that the analyst is forced to take such displayed

understanding at face value, nor that interaction is always well oiled and explicit;

nevertheless, it is one important resource for understanding interaction.

This ability to use participants’ understandings to build up the analysts’ account distinguishes

this work from other types of constructionist research which have focused on texts or

documents, or considered talk abstracted from its conversational context. While discourse

analysts have often worked with interview material, conversation analysts have worked

almost exclusively with natural occurring records of interaction collected with tape recorders

or video and transcribed to a high degree of detail.

There are a number of discussions focused on CA methods. Atkinson and Heritage (1984b),

Heritage (forthcoming), Wooffitt (1990) and Wootton (1989) cover a range of practical

issues, Psathas (1990, 1995) attempts to characterise the analytic mentality that is involved in

this work, and Drew (in press) introduces CA in a way that is designed specifically for

psychologists.

How are discourse and rhetorical analysis similar and different?

The study of rhetoric was revived in the 1970s and 80s with a particular concern with the

argumentative organization of texts and the different rhetorical forms used to make them

persuasive (Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca, 1971). Billig (1987) has highlighted the way

rhetorical ideas can be used to reformulate thinking in psychology. For example, that the

metaphor of an argument can be used to make sense of thought processes; instead of viewing

13
thought as the operation of some calculating mechanism on internally consistent systems of

belief, thought can be seen as riven with argumentative dilemmas whose structure comes

from the available interpretative repertoires of a culture (Billig, et al., 1988). So while a more

orthodox social psychologist might be concerned with an evaluative expression as an index of

a person’s individual attitude, a rhetorical analyst might be concerned to reveal the way that

evaluation is put together to counter an established alternative (Billig, 1988b).

Conversation and rhetorical analysis emphasise two different orders of relationship. CA

emphasises sequential organization across turns; rhetorical analysis emphasises the

relationship between opposing argumentative positions. These may themselves be

sequentially organized, but are not necessarily so. Sometimes they may be expressed as direct

and explicit argumentative claims using the speech act vocabulary of argument (‘I don’t agree

with that’); at other times rhetorical contrasts may be built implicitly, often through

competing descriptions of some action or event; for instance at a rape trial:

Counsel: And during the evening, didn’t Mr. O [the defendant] come over to sit with

you?

Witness: Sat at our table.

(See Drew, 1992; Edwards and Potter, 1992). Discourse analytic studies sometimes collect a

range of different analytic materials — newspaper reports, interactional materials, interviews,

parliamentary records — to facilitate a rhetorical analysis of some domain. In this way it

becomes possible to identify the rhetorical targets and oppositions of particular arguments and

descriptions.

What is the role of interviews in discourse analysis?

Interviews have been used extensively in discourse analytic work; however, they are

construed in a novel manner. Traditionally, the goal of an interview was to produce a piece

of colourless, neutral interaction. However, in practice interviews are as complex and vivid

14
as any other type of interaction, and responses to answers which may seem neutral and non-

committal in the abstract may have an important impact on the trajectory of the interaction.

In discourse research interviews have been used extensively because they allow a relatively

standard range of themes to be addressed with different participants — something hard to

achieve when collecting naturalistic materials. They also allow a high degree of control over

sampling. Interviews are conceptualized as an arena for identifying and exploring

participants interpretative practices rather than an instrument for accessing a veridical account

of something that happened elsewhere, or a set of attitudes and beliefs (Mischler, 1986; Potter

and Mulkay, 1985). An interview can be a particularly effective way of getting at the range of

interpretative repertoires that a participant has available as well as some of the uses to which

those repertoires are put. Billig (1992) and Wetherell and Potter (1992) are both extended

discourse based studies which work principally from interview material and illustrate some of

the analytic possibilities they provide. Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) draw extensively on

CA to show how interviews can be dealt with as an interaction rather than a research

instrument, exploring the way that different social categories are worked up, used and

avoided in the course of interview talk.

Despite the virtues of this use of interviews, there are problems in relating the practices that

happen in interviews to what goes on elsewhere and avoiding the interaction being swamped

by the interviewer’s own categories and constructions. Even the most open ended of

interviews is guided by a schedule which specifies topics and themes as important.

Moreover, even when an interview is understood as an interaction in its own right, the

dominant question and answer format is not ideal for getting at the sorts of turn-by-turn

display of action and understanding that conversation analysts have utilised so effectively.

Partly for these reasons, discourse analysts have been increasingly turning to the study of

records of natural interaction.

15
What is the role of records of natural interaction?

Arguably, one of the most astonishing omissions in 20th century psychology has been the

study of what people do; their interactions in the home and workplace. The few attempts in

this direction were marred by a simplistic behaviourism which ignored interaction or reduced

it to brute movements. Inspired in part by the success of CA in working with records of

natural interaction, discourse analysts have started to work with transcripts of conversations,

newspaper articles, recordings of counselling sessions and similar materials.

The term ‘natural’ here should be taken contrastively. These settings are made up of natural

interaction in the sense that it is not ‘got up’ by the researcher. The test is whether the

interaction would have taken place, and in the form that it did, if the researcher had not been

born. Of course, the use of recording technology itself can have an impact on participants’

understandings of a situation and their actions. However, in practice there are a range of

techniques for minimizing the intrusive effects of recording, such as using a period of

acclimatisation. Practice suggests that such effects are often surprisingly small.

In most cases, such records cannot be used directly — a tape, particularly a video tape, is a
very clumsy way to deal with materials. What is required is a transcription that turns the

record into a form that can be read through quickly, that allows different sections to be

compared, and that can easily be reproduced in research papers. The transcript does not

replace the tape — often it is most helpful to work in parallel with both.

What kind of transcript is most useful?

A transcript is not a neutral, simple rendition of the words on a tape (Ochs, 1979). Different

transcription systems emphasise different features of interaction. For example, a researcher

with a speech therapy interest will need a system that records phonetics; a sociolinguist

concerned with language variety will need some way of showing accent. What system will a

16
discourse analyst need? One common approach claims that discourse analysis concerned

with broad content themes such as interpretative repertoires needs only a relatively basic

scheme which represents the words and relatively gross features such as corrections and

hesitations, while analysis more concerned with interactional specifics will need to represent

pause length, emphasis, various intonational features, overlap and so on. Although there is

some sense to this, it obscures some tensions that need careful consideration.

In the first place, it is not easy, nor analytically satisfactory, to make a strong distinction

between content and interaction in this way. Indeed, one of the consequences of using a basic

transcription scheme is that it will often fail to capture those features which show how the

content is occasioned by the interaction that is taking place. For example, with a research

interview it may obscure just how much the participants’ ‘responses’ are a product of various

activities (some very subtle) on the part of the interviewer. Moreover, one of the virtues of

discourse analytic work is that readers should be able to assess the interpretations that are

made because at least a selection of the original analytic materials have been reproduced. It

might be argued that, even if the analyst is not making use of interactional specifics, a reader

should have them available so they can make their own judgements.

Having made this strong argument for a fuller approach to transcription, it is important to

stress that doing a good transcript is very demanding and time consuming. It is hard to give a

standard figure for how long it takes because much depends on the quality of the recording

(fuzzy, quiet tapes can double the time necessary) and the type of interaction (a couple talking

down the phone present much less of a challenge than a multi-party conversation with a lot

overlapping talk and extraneous noise); nevertheless, a ratio of one hour of tape to twenty of

transcription time is not unreasonable. However, this time should not be thought of as dead

time before the analysis proper. Often some of the most revealing analytic insights come

during transcription because a profound engagement with the material is needed to produce

good transcript — it is always useful to make analytic notes in parallel to the actual

transcription.

17
The most commonly used system in conversation analysis, and increasingly discourse

analysis, was developed by Gail Jefferson. It is a system developed to be easily used with the

symbols on a standard keyboard, and records features of interaction that have been found to

be important for talk-in-interaction. For fuller accounts of Jefferson’s system see Atkinson

and Heritage (1984), Button and Lee (1987), Jefferson (1985) and Psathas and Anderson

(1990).

Can you illustrate the value of a good transcript?

There are numerous CA studies that show how features of interaction that are often missed

out in more basic transcripts can be analytically useful and interactionally consequential.

Most of the work on ‘preference organization’, for example, (the differential marking of

responses such as acceptances and refusals, agreements and disagreements) is inconceivable

without the availability of high quality transcription (see Levinson, 1983).

Here is a fragment of talk from a relationship counselling interview. The Counsellor (C) is

asking the woman (W) about the sequence of events leading to the request for counselling.
Counsellor: Wha- (.) what happened at that point.

Woman: At that poi:nt, (0.6) Jimmy ha- (.)

my- Jimmy is extremely jealous.

Ex- extremely jealous per:son.

Has a:lways ↓been, from the da:y we met.

Y’know?

(DE-JF/C2/S1 — p.4)

18
The Transcription Symbols Used in the Extract
A dash marks a sharp cut off of the prior word.

A colon marks an extension to the preceding sound.

A dot in brackets shows a noticeable pause to short to measure.

Underlining marks emphasised delivery.

A full stop indicates a ‘completing’ intonation, while a comma indicates a continuing

intonation.

Two things may be immediately striking about this extract. First, the transcription symbols

may make it hard to read easily. Second, there seems to be a lot of ‘mess’ in it: repairs and

changes of gear. On the first point, reading transcript is itself something of a skill which

develops with familiarity. After a period getting used to materials of this kind it is the

transcript without the symbols that looks odd — idealized, cleaned and shorn of its specificity

— while the fuller transcript becomes evocative of the interaction captured on the tape. It

starts to be possible to hear, in a sense, the delivery.

On the second point, what seems on first reading to be mess is quickly understandable as

something much more organized. The woman breaks off her direct answer to provide a

description of her partner. This description is reformulated and emphasised until it has a

precise sense that is suitable for the business in hand (briefly and over-simply: starting to

display how the relationship problem is his fault — for more on this, see Edwards,

forthcoming; Potter, forthcoming). The careful transcript here allows us to see this final

version being actively shaped, and gives us a feel for the versions that are rejected as

unsatisfactory.

19
What about reliability and validity?

The notions of reliability and validity have increasingly taken on a mix of everyday and

technical senses in traditional forms of psychology. Reliability is taken to be established in a

quantitative fashion by techniques such as test-retest correlations or inter-rater reliability.

Validity is often treated as established by a congruence between different instruments, or

perhaps a triangulation from different research methods. Because of the different theoretical

assumptions in discourse work, along with its largely non-quantitative nature, these

approaches to reliability and validity are largely unworkable here. Nevertheless, these are

important considerations which can be, and have been, addressed in this work.

Reliability and validity are not so clearly separated in discourse work. Various considerations

are relevant; four important ones being deviant case analysis, participants’ understanding,

coherence and reader evaluation.

Deviant case analysis. A discourse analytic study will often work with a collection of

instances of some putative phenomenon with the aim of showing some pattern or regularity.

For example, an analyst might claim that news interviewees generally avoid treating
interviewers as responsible for views expressed in questions (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1996).

One of the most useful analytic phenomena are cases which seem to go against the pattern or

are deviant in some way. In this type of work such deviant cases are not necessarily

disconfirmations of the pattern (although they could be); instead their special features may

help confirm the genuineness of the pattern (Heritage, 1988). For example, when a news

interviewee does treat the interviewer as accountable for a view posed in a question it can

create serious trouble for the interaction (Potter, forthcoming). The deviant case can show up

just the kind of problem that show why the standard pattern should take the form it does.

Participants Understanding. As I noted in the discussion of conversation analysis, one of its

important elements is its use of participants’ own understandings. Thus instead of the analyst

20
saying that this turn of talk is a compliment, say, the focus is on how the participants’ treat it.

At its simplest, is it responded to with an acknowledgement, perhaps, or a depreciation: ‘Oh

that’s very sweet of you, its just an old top I picked up cheap?’ A common critique of

discourse analytic work is that there is no check on its interpretations. However, a close

attention to participants’ understandings provides one kind of check.

Coherence. One of the features of conversation analysis and increasingly of discourse work

is its cumulative nature. A set of studies can be combined together, and can build on the

insights of earlier work. For example, work on fact construction builds on the insights about

accountability from earlier studies, and its success provides a further confirmation of the

validity of those studies (Edwards and Potter, 1993). There is a sense, then, that each new

study provides a check on the adequacy of previous studies that are drawn on. Those studies

which capture something about interaction can be built on, those that do not are likely to

become ignored.

Readers’ Evaluation. Perhaps the most important and distinctive feature in the validation of

discourse work is the presentation of rich and extended materials in a way that allows readers

of discourse studies to evaluate their adequacy. This has two facets. On the one hand, it

allows them to assess the particular interpretation that is made as it is presented in parallel

with the original materials. This is not the case in much ethnographic work where the

interpretations have to be taken largely on trust and what data that is presented is largely pre-

theorized; nor is it the case with much traditional experimental and content analytic work

where it is rare for ‘raw’ data to be included and more than one or two illustrative codings

presented. On the other hand, readers are themselves skilled interactants with a wide range of

cultural competencies as viewers of news interviews, members of close relationship,

recipients of compliment, and so on. Thus the judgements they can make are not merely

abstract ones of the relation between materials and interpretations, but of the adequacy of

more general claims.

21
A final comment on validity. These features are not all present in all discourse studies; nor

do they singly or in combination guarantee the validity of an analysis. As sociologists of

science have repeatedly shown, there are no such guarantees in science.

Is constructionist research necessarily qualitative?

Some researchers have treated the issue of quantification as a definitional one; it is part of the

meaning of constructionist work in general and DA in particular that it is qualitative.

However, I think this gives too much importance to the quantity/quality divide and risks an

uncritical support of qualitative work and criticism of quantitative. I would rather see

quantification as quite appropriate in certain situations depending on a range of analytic and

theoretical considerations. Nevertheless, arguments for quantification in discourse work can

easily miss the point that the research goal is often that of explicating what should count as an

instance of something; what is a compliment, or a blaming, or an error account? That is not

something decided by counting — is a prerequisite for counting.

The issue of how far quantification is appropriate in conversation and discourse analytic work

has received some detailed attention recently. A useful source is a discussion between

various conversation, communication and discourse research researchers which explores

different perspectives on the role of counting (Wieder, 1993). Schegloff (1993) and Heritage

(forthcoming) both provide clear arguments for being cautious when attempting to quantify

because of a range of difficulties that arise when transforming discursive materials into

numerical form. However, the issue of quantification is undoubtedly going to become more

important with the growth of this research area.

In parallel this discussion of the role of quantification in discourse research there is an

increasing interest in study quantification practices as a topic. Such work has looked at

quantification in both technical and everyday situations. Some of the classic work in this area

was done by Sacks (1992) on members’ measurement systems. He was particularly

22
concerned to show that mundane practices of quantification are not a poor imitation of the

seemingly more precise and accurate technical practices of statisticians and scientists, but

have a subtle and sophisticated logic of their own. For example a request for an appointment

at half past four is not merely a less precise way of requesting an appointment at four twenty

eight. Rather, different sets of expectations about punctuality, the type of meeting it is, and

what delay would count as late are called into play in each case.

Other work in ‘ethnostatistics’, as Gephart (1988) has dubbed the study of statistics as a

cultural practice, has looked at the way health economists have performed cost-benefit

analyses (Ashmore et al, 1989) the construction of accounts of the success of charity funded

cancer treatment (Potter, et al, 1991) and the textual practices for representing the ‘subjects’

in social psychology experiments (Billig, 1994). This work eats away at the idea that there is

a straightforward choice between doing quantitative and qualitative research, and that entirely

different considerations are involved in each.

Is that it?

There are many other considerations about the nature of discourse research and

constructionist work more generally that could be addressed here. However, coming to see

these abstract considerations is quite different from learning to do analysis which is very

much a craft skill like bike riding or chicken sexing. There is no substitute for learning by

doing, and such learning is almost always better done collaboratively so that interpretations

and ideas can be explored with co-workers. Such learning is time consuming, hard work and

often frustrating. However, the goal is to develop an analytic mentality that is sensitive to the

action orientation of talk and texts.

23
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