I’m doing an assignment where I have 6 story completion tasks and I need to apply discourse analysis. Despite reading about the various approaches over and over I’m still confused about which one to choose. I’ve mostly looked at doing either interpretative repertoires or poststructuralist/Foucauldian DA. Is either one of these methods more suited to analysing story completion tasks? The stories talk mostly about experiences that span from childhood until the present moment and how those have affected returning to higher education for mature students.
use a very basic narratology, Keneth Burke plus some Aristotle, which is basically a common sense i.e., hopefully, your own brain. Also Umberto Eco is a good source. CDA and post-structuralist interpretivism (Foucaldian or Derridean) is crap.
Thanks for your insights Pehar Drazen . I’m afraid that for the purpose of this undergrad psych assignment, your suggestions might sway too much in the direction of philosophical rather than psychological approaches. Would you mind saying why you think CDA and FDA are ‘crap’? (I have mixed feelings about them myself).
Burke, or Aristotle, or Eco, is not a philosophy. Walter Fisher is OK too. As to CDA, you can check yourself by reading a few 'foundational' texts by Foucault cited by CDA prophets. My advice is benevolent.
Hi Katarzyna Joanna Mruszczyk , interesting question. First things first, whenever we start a new research project (even a mini project like an undergraduate assignment), we need to have a research question. Even if you are doing the project inductively – you let the data guide you to arrive to a puzzle rather than having a question before you collect the data – you need to come up with a question first. I would suggest reading the stories again and decide what is this one puzzle that hooks you. Only then you can decide which methods of analysis is appropriate. For instance, are you looking at how individuals use language to do something? Then discursive psychology maty be appropriate (e.g., in my paper (Article A discourse of virtue: how poor women entrepreneurs justify ...
, we look at how women entrepreneurs use language/ interpretative repertoires to justify their entrepreneurial activities). You can look at Potter and Wetherell's work on this. It's excellent. Or, are you looking at how micro-discourses are shaped by and shapes macro-discourses? Then Fairclough's critical discourse analysis may be appropriate. Or, if you are looking at how social categories/ identities are positioned vis-a-vis relevant discourses, the foucauldian/ post-structuralist discourse analysis may be appropriate. In sum, you need to find out what you wish to answer first in order to know which discourse analysis approach is the best.I respectfully disagree with Pehar Drazen on the inferiority/ superiority of certain methodology. It all depends on whether the research design is appropriate for answering the research question. We can go deeper into the philosophy of science, which helps to establish our epistemological and ontological positions, and thus strengthen our methodological choice. But, there still needs to be a good fit between the methodological choice and the research objectives.
the stories narrated by children and Fairclough or CDA?? well, for any research question that seems to be a very bad 'methodological choice' Good luck!
I don't see why not. I'm simplifying CDA here, but stories narrated by children may very well reflect macro-discourses and give us insights on the maintenance and reproduction of social (in)equalities. Studies by Celia Kitzinger and Judith Baxter, even though they don't use CDA per se, show that children reproduce and resist macro-discourses in their talk. So, I wouldn't set CDA aside when analysing children's talk. Moreover, I may be mistaken here, Katarzyna Joanna Mruszczyk is analyzing texts that spans from childhood, not texts by children.
Every method has its limitations, which we need to reflect on during the analysis and when reporting the findings. But these limitations may not matter so much if there is a good fit between the RQ and the methodology.
Wish you all the best with the project. If you need reading materials about discourse analysis, send me a message and I'd be glad to give you some recommendations.
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