We present Narrative Analysis (NA), Conversation Analysis (CA), and Discourse Analysis (DA) strategies, representing three of the social sciences’ most powerful and popular qualitative approaches for analyzing talk data. A straightforward definition of strategies is that they are careful plans or methods to achieve a goal. Our primary goal is to provide readers with examples of NA, CA, and DA strategies in order that they can achieve their research objectives. We write from the assumption that the broad goal of many readers of this book is to write their own qualitative analysis article, book, assignment, thesis, or dissertation. But the strategies we write of here can also be directed toward narrower goals of faculty, students, and other researchers alike, including: fine-tuning the link between your primary research question and your methods; ensuring that your theoretical stance coheres with your methods; and organizing your analysis in a way that will be recognizable to intellectual communities of narrative, conversation, or discourse analysts.
There are quite a few other important things we ask you to keep in mind in reading this book. We assume that you have already collected data in the form of talk, following a research design, in order to answer a research question related to the wider literature relevant to your topic, and to how you distinctively theorize it. We also assume that you have some basic sense of how to code qualitative data. We’re not going to review all that. Instead, what this book is about is directing your analysis of talk data strategically. It is about helping you to focus your coding and analysis in a direction guided by NA, CA, or DA. Toward that end, we answer the following questions for each of the overarching strategies:
What is it good for? What kinds of research questions, settings, or forms of talk data is it especially suited to?
What is its intellectual history? Who are the founding thinkers, and what are the key works? Is there a canon – or active opposition to formulating one?
Have scholars in particular disciplines contributed key insights? Have they been talking to one another in the process?
What are its social theoretical underpinnings? What are you assuming about the nature of knowledge if you use it?
What standards does it set for a rigorous analysis?
What are its key concepts and analytic foci?
Are there key debates or sticking points you should be aware of? Are there concepts or terms that tend to be used confusingly in the literature? (We’ll flag these for you!)
How does it compare or contrast with the other overarching strategies? Are there points at which they discuss the same thing?
You may also find that you read some but not all of this book. No problem. We quite liked imagining readers who would take up the chapters of most interest to them. We worked carefully to design this book so that it could be read by holistic or selective readers alike.
Why Talk Data? Why these Three Strategies?
At some point in their careers, most researchers in the social sciences will find themselves working on a project that involves talk data, in which at least two parties interact, whether from interviews, from recording naturalistic talk in everyday or institutional settings, or from media, including television talk shows, political speeches, or newspaper articles that quote laypersons and experts. The popularity of talk data has burgeoned since World War II – not only because tape recorders became inexpensive, but also in response to social, political, and intellectual currents.
You will see that some of the strategies that this book presents carry forward the spirit of civil rights, feminist, queer, decolonization, and other movements and identity politics, all of which are concerned with ordinary people and their communities. Post World War II narrative analysts distinguish themselves here for their efforts to recuperate subjugated histories, and for their humanist emphasis. That is, they are particularly interested in individuals’ perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of their circumstances, with their quests for meaning, and with experiential, rather than expert, knowledge. In some circles of NA this ‘interpretive turn’ came in response to the limitations of research that emulated scientific models of inquiry.
Although many of today’s conversation analysts take up social problems, the founding insight of CA had nothing to do with social problems. Instead, it was to hail ordinary talk as the foundational site of shared meanings and the very basis of the social order. In so doing, CA set itself apart from earlier linguistics projects, which had looked askance at the messy spontaneities of ordinary talk, and treated such talk as an impure and inconsequential form of language. It also distinguished itself from earlier sociological work that took a top-down approach to questions of how social order is possible.
Discourse analysts, meanwhile, have always been concerned with power dynamics or material and social inequalities. As you will see, they are not humanist in their emphasis in the same way as narrative analysts and they do not see talk as solely foundational. They see talk as part of wider webs of meanings and practices – or discourses – that are implicated in producing social problems.
In this book, you will find that CA strategies always pay heed to what makes talk so distinctive. NA and DA strategies are less consistent about this, in that some literary-based NA strategies work equally well for spoken and written narratives, while DA strategies conceptualize talk as one of many forms of social text. Therefore, throughout our discussions of strategies, you may find us making reference to any or all of talk’s distinctive bundle of features:
1 We talk in ways that are socially available to us: we use language, an imperfect way to represent experience; we employ conversational mechanisms; and we draw upon discourses that may free or coerce us.
2 Talk is uttered by individuals who have agency (or seem to).
3 Talk emerges in the moment.
4 Although talk is ephemeral, vanishing with the passing moment in which it occurs, through research methods it becomes fixed in transcripts.
5 Talk is embodied, involving gesture, tones, rhythms, and more, although the social sciences struggle for a vocabulary through which to capture that.
6 In this embodied medium, speakers’ bodies can act as signifiers.
For each of NA, CA, and DA, you will see an entire chapter devoted to the site of talk that is the interview, one of the most common data collection methods and one of the best-theorized. Importantly, in each of the three strategies, rather than treating interviews and other data collection methods as neutral tools, the talk in research encounters has come to be recognized as socially constructed. Method, too, has become an object of study and is seen to play a role in the knowledge that analytic strategies produce.
Our Approach
Upon first glance, you may think that this book is simply a bulky literature review. It is not. In meeting our goal of providing other researchers with analytic strategies, we read a lot. We read research articles and books with the intent of uncovering the multitude of purposes to which NA, CA, and DA were used and distilling strategies from them. As well, we complement our analysis of others’ scholarly discussions of talk and methods of analyzing it with primary data from each of our own independent qualitative research projects and some examples from popular media. We sometimes write about articles as narrative analysis when their authors see them as a mix of narrative and discourse analysis and we often focus on only a few lines of a conversation analysis when, of course, the author’s analysis was deeper and more extensive. In each instance, our intent was to pull out the analytic significance of a piece for our purpose