Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 9

Picture these scenarios:

1 As a graduate student, you’ve conducted 45 interviews. You have over 1000 pages of near verbatim transcripts of the interviews to analyze. You panic when you look at these pages. You panic more when your supervisor tells you that simply ‘coding your data for themes’ will not help you at your defense or at the job talks you hope will follow.

2 As a researcher, you’ve encountered numerous challenges in recruiting the 30 participants you’ve planned for your study. Between timelines and funding troubles, you’ve had to wrap up your data collection with only 12 interviews completed. You now have talk data, but not enough for the kinds of analytic strategies you’re used to. You don’t know what to do.

3 As a professor, you’re responsible for mentoring students to their successful completion of their degrees. You have a meeting with a promising student who has obtained ethics approval for videotaping marital counseling sessions. When you ask him, ‘What method of analysis are you planning to use?’, he says, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

4 One of your doctoral students intends to do research on understanding the experience of surviving cancer. When you meet to discuss her research proposal, she explains that she thought using a Foucauldian approach would give her work cachet.

5 You’ve never been completely satisfied with how you’ve been analyzing data. You do the same things you always do and, frankly, you’re bored. You wonder how you might spice things up.

What would you do in each of these scenarios? Our answer is that you should read this book. We wrote it for our advanced students and for researchers like us, for those curious about how to use new approaches and for those who are overwhelmed, exhausted, stuck, or confused and in need of help – quick help, not the kind of help where you realize you’ll have to read hundreds of books and articles to get some purchase on what your options are. We read for you, aiming to pinpoint strategies you could find useful.

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.