Discursive Psychology Introduction

Discursive Psychology Introduction

• It highlights the study of texts and talk as social practices
• Describes the theoretical and methodological features
• It distinguishes discursive psychology from conversation analysis by four features
• It illustrates the logic of analysis through Princess Diana's use of "I dunno"
• It considers how stake and interest become participants' concerns
• Particular discursive constructions manage or "inoculate" against stake
• It analyses extracts from newspaper reports and relationship counseling sessions
• Discursive psychology focuses on discourse analysis to study naturally occurring talk
• Discourse analysis can be confusing due to diverse forms developed in various disciplinary environments
• These include: linguistics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and post-structuralism

Discursive Psychology Overview

• Discursive psychology is a broad approach that combines meta-theoretical assumptions, theoretical ideas, analytic orientations, and bodies of work
• It draws heavily on conversation analytic work
• It emphasizes the production of versions of the world, society, events, and inner psychological worlds in discourse
• It focuses on participants' constructions and how they are accomplished and undermined
• Acknowledges the constructed and contingent nature of researchers' own versions
• Treats realism as a rhetorical production that can be deconstructed.
• It studies discourse as texts and talk in social practices, not as abstract linguistic entities
• Focuses on language as a medium for interaction and rhetorical organization
• Claims and versions are constructed to undermine alternatives
• It is an analysis of what people do with language.
• DP's focus may seem to lie between individual psychology and structural sociology
• This conception falls within social psychology or micro-sociology
• DP undermines traditional psychological notions by reformulating them discursively
• Cognitive scripts can be reworked by examining how people use 'script formulating' descriptions
• There is a field of discursive study largely untouched in mainstream psychology
• The micro–macro distinction is blurred by conversation analytic studies
• These studies concern institutionally specific properties like news interviews or doctor-patient consultations constituted in talk

Discursive Psychology in Practice

• Pedagogic interaction occurs in classrooms, but much classroom activity is not pedagogic
• Recognizable pedagogic interaction happens outside classrooms
• Social structure becomes part of interaction as it is worked up, invoked, and reworked
• Psychological notions are constructed in and for institutions, shaping organizational features
• Contemporary DP focuses on analyzing audio/video recordings of people interacting
• Earlier discursive work used open-ended interviews.
• It is primarily qualitative, opposing counting and coding due to obscuring activities with talk and texts

Discursive Psychology Methodology

• It rejects codified methods with specific guidelines
• The analytic procedure to arrive at claims differs from how those claims are justified
• Discourse analysis involves craft skill, like "sexing a chicken"
• Adequacy is evaluated through deviant cases, participant orientation, coherence, and reader evaluation
• Learning the requisite skills is necessary
• In social research, a question leads to a method
• In DP, questions unsuited to it exist
• Assumptions about factors and outcomes clash with its rhetorical and normative logic
• DP deals with constructions and versions to be adopted, responded to, or undermined
• Norms provide a way of interpreting deviations, not templates for action
• DP studies phenomena patterned by ordered choices in settings
• General focus is on texts and talk as social practices
• There is a dual focus on practices and resources
• Gender inequality studies consider construction, factuality, and justifications, along with resources used to sustain inequalities

Naturally Occurring Talk

• Focuses on spoken language independent of researcher actions, like everyday conversations or board meetings
• It is not "got up" by the researcher using social research technology
• Natural talk would occur similarly regardless of the researcher's involvement
• Experiments, focus groups, and interviews would be canceled if the researcher was unavailable, unlike natural talk
• It analyzes interviews as interaction between parties, like a telephone conversation or courtroom cross-examination
• Social categories are refined through unfolding conversational interaction

Discursive Psychology Relation to Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

• DP draws on conversation analysis (CA) methods
• It has four areas of divergence
• DP is constructionist, focusing on how versions and descriptions are assembled to perform actions
• Ethnomethodological tension with social constructionism is unclear
• DM also focuses on rhetorical organization beyond sequential organization in conversation analysis
• Understanding sequential organization is needed for rhetorical organization
• DP provides an alternative to cognitivist psychology
• It refutes explaining action through underlying cognitive states
• Cognition's status in ethnomethodology and CA is contentious
• DP is shaped by the sociology of scientific knowledge, having a more skeptical view on truth and knowledge
• Differences manifest more in theory and justification than actual procedures

Princess Diana and "I dunno"

• An interview from BBC television featured Martin Bashir interviewing Princess Diana Spencer
• A close analysis of the two "I dunno's" reveals facts about doing discursive psychology research
• The talk fragments are related to more broader and established analytic concerns with fact construction and the role of descriptions in interaction
• Fragments are treated as trivial details of interaction
• Harvey Sacks emphasized what may seem to be minor details can be highly significant for interactants
• Social scientists treat talk as a way to express information between speakers
• Roy Harris refers to this as the "telementation view of language"
• The features of the talks are considered determining precisely what action is being performed
• Talk is transcribed as it is delivered, rather than being rendered into a conventional ‘playscript’ common in many kinds of qualitative work
• 'I dunno' contrasts discursive psychology with a cognitive psychological approach
• A cognitive psychologist may consider such statements to be "uncertainty tokens"
• 'I dunno' allows one to compare and contrast a cognitive and discursive approach to talk
• Research indicates the best way to make a set of materials may be to consider other sorts of findings.
• A good sense of everyday and institutional talk is essential for producing high-quality analyzes
• One way into Princess Diana's 'I dunno's' is to consider issues of stake and interest

Stake in Discourse Analysis

• Work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis emphasizes accountability in interaction
• Discursive psychologists emphasize participants placing significance on stake and interest
• Referencing stake discounts an action or rework its nature
• Blaming can be discounted as spite, or offers discounted as attempts to influence
• Speakers invoke an interest to undercut a claim
• The phrase 'they would, wouldn't they' treats the Iranians' claim as expected with shared knowledge
• The potential for invoking stake and interest to discount claims is evident
• Discourse and conversation analysts found widespread issues suggest well-developed procedures
• These examples include managing turn-taking and terminating conversations
• Scientists keep separate inconsistent repertoires of terms for justifying claims and undermining opponents
• Devices developed exist for dealing with situations where those repertoires come together
• Procedures exist people use to resist discounting
• A candidate discursive technique for undermining discounting was used: 'Dr Post was initially skeptical'
• The feature of the article that struck the author was the initial skepticism from Dr. Post
• The skepticism counters potential criticism that Dr. Post is performing stereotypes about madness and creativity
• His conclusions are factual counter to original interests
• People avoid catching a disease such as tuberculosis by being inoculated against it
• Conversationalists/writers limit the ease with which their talk can be undermined by doing stake inoculation

More About Delicacy

• Analysis does not depend on stereotype existing, but is invoked in this text
• The analysis moves between conversational and textual material
• Discursive psychologists are more willing to combine the materials
• A priori assumptions about differences are avoided
• Talk and texts are oriented to action orient to issues of sake and may be inoculated against discounting
• Background considerations that might help us understand Princess Diana’s ‘I dunno’s’ are emphasized
• It helps to collect more examples of similar kinds
• A corpus is built for study or coding, and used to provide analyst patterns and highlight construcitons
• Initial procedures are similar, the goal isn't to content analyze providing counts within categories

“I Don’t Know” Example

• Jimmy is describing a difficult pub evening with his wife, Connie
• The session contains complaints from Jimmy that Connie flirts with other men
• There also contains suggestions from Connie that Jimmy is pathologically jealous
• It is possible that Jimmy is seeing harmless sociability as sexual suggestion
• Connie had a short skirt on, but Jimmy says I don’t know
• Variability that discourse analysts have used is impactful for analysis
• It appears in the different versions where people are constructing their talk in ways to make different actions
• In this case, we can search the materials for other references to Connie's skirt length
• Connie then says My skirt probably went up to about there, then gives a sharp intake of breath
• Jimmy showed no doubt of the skirts length
• The interpretation of an "I dunno" as a stake inoculation doesn't fit, and isn't a plain declaration of just not knowing

Stake Management

• Two things are highlighted about each item
• The very first thing that Connie does is attempts to contest it
• The descriptions are about moral categories
• It displays to give assistance to support own comprehension the working of description
• Sharp inbreath that Connie in skirt is about to highly audible disagree that
• The point about evidence, and Jimmy is about memory, and there's no clouded area
• Interoperation, support, psychological and stake inoculation
• Interview with Spencer, what do you stand for? It is more positive, makes suggestion
• In this question, the Diana has, the spurned act in the book. All of the things that go into the question
• The placement of the uncertainty, you are, Diana had it helps
• Is a lovely exhibition

Thoughts on Themes

• A review showed what procedures can assist and lead to such analysis
• Analytic, best development skills, developing practice, and analytical mentality
• Start with a setting or phenomenon, not a hypothesis
• Code preliminary to analyze
• Included/ excluded in research course
• High quality, consequential
• Avoid trading on those assumptions
• Make parts in interaction
• For example accounts, it's easy to be factual - The best I have considered small or the insight is more general
• Analyze, and let's see the insight makes receipt of gentle The sequence starts with about

Friends Clip Analysis

• "The One with the Boobies" – each "I don't know" is heavily emphasized
• The chapter overviews psychology
• Themes, and the psychological
• Actions in terms, people are what they're doing
• The psychological increase, building
• Different institutional settings and mediator has grown.