dream event 2: andy mckinlay

Introduction to discourse analysis

Andy McKinlayProfessor of Social Psychology

The University of Edinburgh

2DREaM Edinburgh Workshop, 25 October 2011

• One answer is: plain curiosity• Of course, most of us hope that in answering

questions we are curious about, we are going to find out things that are of benefit to people in general – this is what separates out academic research from the finance-oriented research of commerce and industry

Why do research?


We might be interested in research for a variety of other reasons.•Research provides evidence for future planning (e.g. ‘Does this new approach work or not?’).•Research communicates our ideas to others in a persuasive way (e.g. Not just ‘I think that ....’ but ‘I can show that ....’).•Research often throws up new and unexpected ideas.•Research allows others to become engaged in actively examining ideas (e.g. as research participants).•Research can have strategic benefits (e.g. contacts with fund-raisers or colleagues in other areas).

Why do research?


• First, the bad news: I can’t tell you what research questions you ought to pursue

• After all, YOU are the experts in LIS! So you have to decide what questions you want to pursue, and you have to decide who you are going to approach as participants to help you answer it: will it be other LIS professionals? Will it be clients? Will it be local authority administrators? Will it be the general public?

What is the research question?


• Now the good news.

• I can tell you how you about some processes you could follow to come up with research questions.



Here are four different processes to come up with a good research question•Observation•Theory•Contingency•Communication



OBSERVATIONWhen my mother was in her eighties and spent some time in hospital, I happened to observe that some nursing staff were very good and supportive of her, but others seemed rather off-hand.

So I began to pose myself the question: are there two different sorts of nurses’ attitudes to the elderly?



THEORYThere is a theory in social psychology that we see ourselves, e.g. in relation to our gender or nationality or health, in terms of ‘social identities’ . The theory says if a social identity gets switched on, this forces us to think of ourselves in terms of being male or female, or Scottish or English, or healthy or sick.

But I and my research colleagues began to pose ourselves the question: is that really true, or do we sometimes resist this sort of thing by categorizing ourselves in a more subtle way?



CONTINGENCYWhen I first started out in my career, there was no such thing as the ‘personal computer’. And there was definitely no such thing as ‘chatting’ via computers. But nowadays, lots of kids know how to use MSN chat or other types of online chat to keep in touch with their friends.

When these sorts of systems were first developed, I posed myself the question: is ‘talking’ to people via these new fangled chat programmes the same as or different from talking to people face to face?



COMMUNICATIONYou don’t have to come up with research questions all by yourself. Sometimes good questions arise out of discussion you have with colleagues. In fact, some of the best research questions come out of discussions you have with people who are outside of your own discipline.

A while ago I got to know a bunch of engineers who told me about broadband telecommunications. I never really understood the engineering side, but it did make me pose a question to myself: could broadband be used to help people with disabilities?


CommunicationOf course, you can also get ideas from other researchers in your own area. Here are some research paper titles drawn in just one year (2011) from just one LIS research journal: Library & Information Science Research



‘“If it is too inconvenient I'm not going after it:” Convenience as a critical factor in information-seeking behaviours’‘Public libraries: A meeting place for immigrant women?’‘Student perceptions of the information professions and their master's program in information studies’‘Library anxiety among Polish students: Development and validation of the Polish Library Anxiety Scale’‘Representations of youth in local media: Implications for library service’‘Gracious space: Library programming strategies towards immigrants as tools in the creation of social capital’‘“I did not realize so many options are available”: Cognitive authority, emerging adults, and e-mental health’‘Users' perceptions of university library websites: A unifying view’‘Asking and sharing information in the blogosphere: The case of slimming blogs’



The sorts of research questions that we might find in these papers:

Understanding users’ behavioursUsers’ perceptions of the libraryRole of the library in the community and wider societyStudent perceptions of the professionDeveloping measurement scalesThe media and the library/information scienceThe role of ‘e-Provision’ and the impact of ‘e-Technology’ including social networking

PLUS: Any other research question that you are personally interested in!




How to answer research questions

The essence of answering a research question is that we use an appropriate research method to collect relevant data and then analyze those data somehow. The results of those analyses are then used to provide the answer to the research question.



The LIS workshops are going to explore a range of methods for gathering data and them analyzing them.

Today I want to focus on just one approach: using qualitative data and analyzing them though a process called ‘discourse analysis’.



By ‘qualitative data’, I mean evidence that is gathered by looking directly at what people say, either in spoken or written form.

So quantitative data differ from qualitative data because in qualitative approaches there is no attempt to turn what people say (or think, or believe etc.) into numbers.



Suppose, for example, you had a research interest in how staffing within a LIS organization impacts upon levels of service.One thing you may want to find out about is what different people think about current staffing and, in particular, whether staffing should be expanded. You could approach that question by gathering either quantitative or qualitative data.


How to answer research questionsQuantitative data• How many

managers said ‘Yes’ and how many said ‘No’?

• How many staff?• How many users?


How to answer research questionsQualitative data"There's nothing that depresses me more than going into a library and being confronted by a computer and someone in authority who isn't going to deliver the citizen-focused services I think should be on offer. I won't have this. Libraries can't go on being merely traditional. That's why we should consider volunteers. In Manchester, I celebrated a scheme recently to get young people working as volunteers in libraries in ways that are of great benefit to them and the customers. That could be a blueprint.“ (Margaret Hodge, Culture Minister, March 2010)



One thing we can notice right away is that it is harder to get a ‘picture’ of how the qualitative data can help us to answer a research question, because the discourse produced by Margaret Hodge is complex whereas the graph seems to show a nice clear image of what is going on.


How to answer research questionsHowever, researchers who rely on discourse analysis argue that the simplification you get from reducing responses to numbers often hides complexity that we ought to be paying attention to.And they argue that discourse analysis techniques allow us to explore those complexities so that we can use what people have said (or written) in order to answer the research question.So as one means of how to answer research questions, I want to turn now to discuss discourse analysis.


Discourse analysisBefore you can analyze discourse, you need to find it.Here are three sources of discourse data (always bearing in mind the ethical dimension of research).

Media (e.g. radio; television; internet; newspapers)Documentary sources (e.g. official documents;promotional materials; formal records of events)Do-it-yourself (e.g. recording naturally occurring talk such as meetings or mealtimes; interviews; focus groups)


Discourse analysisIf the data involve spoken rather than written discourse, the researcher has to record what is said (unless the data are already in recorded form).The next task is to transcribe the recording. The reason for this is that discourse is very complex, and it is often difficult to perform appropriate analysis without seeing the data written down. (And, anyway, the researcher will want to provide written examples in the research report.)


Discourse analysisSo now you can see that each of those sources has advantages.Media sources are easy to obtain and easy to record.Written media and documentary sources (including written internet data) do not require transcription.Naturally occurring talk requires recording and transcribing, but it is ‘real’ talk in a ‘real’ context. Interviews, focus-groups etc. require both recording and transcribing but unlike other sources, the discourse will be focused exactly on your research question.


Discourse analysisIf you are going to use interviews or focus groups, you have to pre-prepare by organizing a list of interview questions or focus-group issues that people will discuss.

Most researchers ‘pilot’ interview questionnaires and focus-group materials before they gather data.


Discourse analysisIf you are going to use interviews or focus groups, once you have settled on your interview or focus-group questions/issues you have to identify the people who will be your participants, i.e. your interviewees or focus group members.Sometimes the nature of the participants is determined by the research question, on other occasions ‘anyone will do’.But some discourse analysts do try to make sure that the participant sample is ‘balanced’ in some ways.Most discourse analysts do not use ‘randomized’ samples but instead rely on ‘convenience’ samples.


Discourse analysisIn interviews and focus groups, the researcher normally begins by explaining the study to the participants, describing the interview process itself (how long etc.), offering a chance for participants to seek clarification, obtaining ‘informed consent’, and then starting the interview itself with one or two ‘easy’ factual-type questions as ‘icebreakers’.


Discourse analysisThe rest of the interview or focus group discussion involves questions/issues that are relevant to the overall research question.They should not be ‘leading’ or ‘closed’.They should be organized thematically so that they ‘make sense’ to interviewees or focus group members. In discourse analysis studies, usually all participant are asked the same questions.Remember the idea is to get participants to talk, not you!In between these questions, the interviewer can use ‘probes’ (e.g. ‘uhuh?’, ‘how do you mean?’) to elicit further information.The interviewer may use structuring statements (e.g. ‘OK, moving onto the next question ....’) to ‘control’ the interview.


Discourse analysis

The interview or focus group normally ends with the researcher thanking participants and offering contact details and the opportunity for participants to receive anonymized results.


Discourse analysisOnce you have the (transcribed) data, the next task is to analyze them.

Most discourse analysts begin this process by reading through the entire corpus of data several times, and then ‘homing in’ on particular examples of the data where what is said (or written) seems especially relevant to the research question. This is sometimes called the ‘first-pass’ analysis.


Discourse analysisOnce you have an extended set of examples of discourse, all of which seem in some way relevant to the research question, the next task is to analyze these in detail.

To see what that process is like, we have to look at how discourse analysts think about discourse.


Discourse analysisAccording to discourse analysts:

Discourse is contextualDiscourse is rhetoricalDiscourse is action-orientedDiscourse is constructedDiscourse is constructive

Let’s look at each of these in turn.


Discourse analysisTalk always arises in some sort of social context. But although what is said in talk is influenced by its context, it is not determined by it.For example, the fact that talk occurs in the context of a doctor’s office does not mean that it has to be medical discourse. Or: just because a police officer and a citizen are talking does not mean they are discussing crime.So categorizations and identities such as doctor and patient or police officer and citizen are not necessarily analytically relevant to understanding a particular interaction just because the context is a doctor’s surgery or a police interview room.


Discourse analysisOf course, in everyday life people do treat particular contexts as being associated with certain social norms (i.e. social rules). For example, we normatively expect that doctors offer advice and that it is police officers, not suspects, who ask questions.

So although contexts don’t completely determine what is said, in everyday life we all have normative expectations about what will be said in a given context. This is of interest to discourse analysts because often, when such norms are breached, participants display this in what they say next.


Discourse analysis

Video: ‘I was your boss ...’


Discourse analysisIn talk, claims or descriptions are often produced in a context where alternative or competing versions potentially might be offered. Discourse analysts view talk as rhetorical because talk is often designed to take account of, or even ‘pre-empt’, these potential alternative or competing descriptions or claims.


Discourse analysisSo, for example, a description of someone might be designed so as to resist potential attempts to disqualify that description as being produced as a consequence of the speaker’s stake or interest in producing that description (e.g. ‘You are only saying that because you are jealous ...’). Or, if such a claim is made, speakers may rhetorically design their response to undermine that claim.


Discourse analysis

Video: Steve Bell talks to George Osborne


Discourse analysisDiscourse is used to perform actions and carry out social practices in the whole range of practical and interactional tasks arising in social life (e.g. work, leisure, relationships, social interactions). Discourse analysts capture this aspect via the notion of action orientation.


Discourse analysisEven if discourse is ostensibly factual or descriptive, speakers produce such discourse in order to perform particular social actions. So some social actions (e.g. blamings, invitations) may be ‘obvious’, but others (e.g. displaying ‘neutrality’ in providing a description) may be less obvious, but still count as actions that are being performed.


Discourse analysisDiscourse analysts are interested in how talk is constructed. They are interested in how specific words, metaphors, idioms, rhetorical devices, descriptions, accounts, stories and so on are drawn on and built up as we use discourse to perform particular social actions.


Discourse analysisHow, for example, might a story be constructed to present a speaker’s conduct as caused by that person’s particular psychology (e.g. ‘It is because you are stupid ...’)? Or, on the other hand, how might someone construct a story so that that conduct is presented as mundane or everyday or caused by external factors?


Discourse analysis

Video: Sarah Palin


Discourse analysis

Discourse analysts are also interested in how discourse becomes constructive - how different versions of phenomena are constructed in discourse.


Discourse analysisHow are versions of different features of the local situation constructed? How are broader social structures outwith the immediate situation constructed (e.g. how are groups of people who are portrayed as different from the speaker constructed)?How does discourse construct the broader historical context in which the immediate situation and broader social issues are located? And, in each case, how is that construction being used to perform a particular social action?


Discourse analysisDiscourse analysts try to explain how these different versions are assembled and then stabilized so as to present these versions as factual and independent of the producer. And the analyst will focus on the question of which practices these constructions are a part of, and on the question of how these constructions perform the social actions in which the speaker is engaged.


Discourse analysis

Video: ‘I’ve got a few friends who are quite upper class ...’


Discourse analysis

Workshop example


Discourse analysis

Workshop example feedback session


Closing commentsOne way to answer research questions is to gather and analyze qualitative data.Discourse analysis is one way to analyze this sort of data.It emphasizes the importance of context, rhetoric, action-orientation and construction.


Closing commentsQualitative data allow the researcher to explore the complexities of how people actually think about an issue. Using qualitative data allows participants to have a direct ‘voice’ in the research.People who read the research often find it helpful to see examples of what people actually say – it lends vividness to the research results.

dream event 2: andy mckinlay

Education

dream edinburgh workshop

focus group members

answer research questions

construct ed

police officer

discourse analysts

qualitative data

qualitative data