While writing this book, we listened a lot. From our discussions with students in Education, Film, Law, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Work, Sociology, and Women’s Studies, we learned that students across the disciplines often struggled to define their core concepts or to relate their theories to their analytic strategies. Students raised questions that challenged us, and that illustrated that working with qualitative analytic strategies is not a matter of black or white, but of shades of grey.
If you are looking for the ‘Bischoping and Gazso model of analysis,’ you will not find it here. We saw our role as synthesizing sprawling and interdisciplinary literatures, curating strategies with wide application to readers across the social sciences, and mapping out debates while clearly signaling the rough patches. In our syntheses, we deliberately use common language such as ‘fine-grained’ narrative analysis or ‘garden-variety’ discourse analysis rather than inventing elaborate typologies. We do not want our language to get in the way of your finding of strategies that work for you. What we do want to emphasize is the importance of remembering the paradigms about the nature of knowledge that underlie any application of these strategies.
In this, we are influenced by Guba and Lincoln (1994) whose work revealed to each of us that ontology, what can be known, and epistemology, how we know, and the standards for rigorous analysis should all go hand in hand in choosing and using an overarching analytic strategy. For this reason, we devote sections of each Part of this book to setting these paradigms forth. So the reader will find that, in simplest terms, we write about how NA, CA, and DA strategies can be varyingly positioned along a continuum between realism, in which a reality is thought to exist though it may never be perfectly apprehendable, and constructionism, where reality is a construct of persons and groups. Realists might be interested in what really happened in the past or about the real consequences of material inequalities. Constructionists might take up how the past is diversely understood or how experience is constituted by larger meaning-making systems. And there’s more than one flavor of each of these as well as blends in between. With these understandings in hand, you can be confident and crafty, meaning to have good craftsmanship, in adopting analytical strategies that best fit your theoretical leanings and research interests in a particular project. There is considerable freedom and even fun to be found in eclecticism.
We write as sociologists. This means that throughout the book, we are inevitably drawn to strategies that speak to one of the central concerns of our home discipline: the relationship of the individual to society, what is sometimes called the micro–macro link or the relation of agency to structure. Our book cannot exhaustively cover all approaches to NA, CA, and DA in the social sciences, let alone all the cross-overs of these overarching strategies into the humanities. Importantly, we are not linguists. We slice the pie of talk differently from linguists. Some linguists would say all naturally occurring, non-hypothetical talk is discourse. Therefore they would say that conversation analysis falls under the discourse analysis umbrella rather than being separate from it. Sociologists, however, see discourse as encompassing naturally occurring talk, scripted talk, text, practices, ideology, and power and, for this reason, distinguish conversation analysis, which is solely about talk, from discourse. Our disciplines have agreed to disagree.
Our book is written in three parts: Analyzing Narratives; Analyzing Talk-in-interaction; Analyzing Discourse. Each part begins with an introduction to its intellectual project and then explains the subsequent chapter contents. We will not go into this here. For a flavor of each, see Textbox 1.1.
You will find each chapter may introduce as many as ten or more strategies, marked in italics. We use bold to denote key concepts or terms and provide definitions of these in the course of the text. Further, the astute reader will soon realize that some of these concepts or terms seem alike but are used in different ways in different over-arching strategies. For example, ‘authority’ is used in different ways in NA and CA. We use the icon to the left to highlight these potentially confusing concepts or terms throughout the book. As you browse through this work, we hope that you find strategies that inspire you. And, one last thing before you turn the page: a good work can be done by choosing just one or two strategies, just as a delightful meal can consist of two courses or even one if it truly suits your tastes.
Textbox 1.1: If It Were a Game …
Narrative analysts treat narrative as though it were Solitaire, the game for the contemplative player, with or without an onlooker. The player contemplates the relations among cards, the meaning of their sequences, the ways her game has turned out or could have turned out if played differently. At the same time as the player has agency, she is constrained by the structure of possibilities offered by the cards. Similarly, narratives involve searching for meanings in relation to the flow of events over time. A narrator can replay his story, or arrange its events differently to find new meanings. He has agency at the same time as he is structurally constrained. And, he might tell his story differently depending on who’s present.
Studying talk as a conversation analyst would be like studying Slapjack, a card game in which players take turns at laying down a card, face up. Everyone watches with eagle eyes for a Jack to be laid down, because whoever slaps it first moves ahead in the game. The fun comes from the game’s fast pace and the players’ hair-trigger responsiveness to what the last player has done – in these characteristics, it is like conversation, with its rapid fire coordination among speakers, its speakers’ responsiveness to the most recent utterances, and its chaotic orderliness. Finally, this game is child’s play, involving taken-for-granted competences.
Analyzing discourse would be like analyzing a game of Scrabble. Our vocabulary permits our action in a competitive game where knowledge is power. In Scrabble, letters materially ground the words we can possibly construct, just as economic and political circumstances ground the discourses to which we contribute. Your performance in Scrabble hinges on what is made discursively available to you by preceding moves in the game: as a skilled wordsmith or a three-letter wonder. Likewise discourses constrain or produce possibilities, setting conditions on their agency. Further, playing the game of Scrabble and life well involves performing according to norms – or the Scrabble dictionary – or risk being disciplined.
Part I Analyzing Narratives
Is narrative analysis right for my data? What is a narrative and how is it different from a story? How do I go about narrative analysis? What do I look for? These are some of the questions that concern us when we have collected talk data and are considering whether or not narrative analysis is a suitable strategy with which to approach it. We speak to these concerns in this chapter.
Narrative analysis will appeal to you if you are a humanist, interested in understanding individuals’ and communities’ quests for meaning. Narratives tell us about the perceptions individuals and communities have of everyday life experiences and about how what is meaningful is expressed. You might equally be intrigued by how narratives reflect social norms, mores, and values about what the form and content of a ‘good story’ should be, as well as larger, more abstract social structures, and institutions. Because narratives are told in interaction between two or more people, at the same time as they are situated in wider and changing contexts, both local and global, narrative analysis will offer you distinctive opportunities to examine the theoretical juncture of the micro and the macro.
While there have been many scholarly waves of interest in narrative analysis, it is presently rising on the same tide as the social and political rights movements and identity politics of the 1960s onwards. Narrative analysis is valued because it can reveal diverse lives, including those that may be bracketed as unusual or socially deviant, those that are broadly perceived as normative, and those that are largely unsung or overlooked. To present the stories of the subjugated can be a means of witnessing and drawing attention to the social inequalities and oppression they experience. As we read for this part of the book, seeking out examples, we felt spoiled for choice, as voices and personalities came powerfully and vividly to the fore. Narrative