Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 11

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 of showing the reader how one might go about doing NA, CA, or DA. We included works that we admired and considered exemplary.

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.