Analyzing Qualitative Interview Data: The Discourse Analytic Method

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Abstract

The article presents discourse analysis as a method of analyzing qualitative interview data. Using examples from a study of users' library conceptions, it is argued that participants' interpretations are much more context dependent and variable than normally recognized, and that this has important implications for the use of interview data. Instead of producing definitive versions of participants' action or beliefs, interview data may be used to reveal regular interpretative practices through which participants construct versions of actions, cognitive processes, and other phenomena. This method does not take the individual as the principal unit of analysis, but strives to recognize cultural regularities in participants' accounts to examine the phenomena studied at a macrosociologic level.

Section snippets

Context-dependent variation in interview talk

The constructivist method of interpretation used in discourse analysis problematizes some traditional approaches in qualitative analysis. Interview talk is approached with very different expectations from how we have learned, as members of culture, to interpret people's talk in everyday life. Participants' accounts, or verbal expressions, are not treated as descriptions of actual processes, behavior, or mental events. Interview talk is by nature a cultural and collective phenomenon. The meaning

Participants' interpretation work

The kind of variation and inconsistency seen in the extracts is not an exception, nor is it a product of the interview situation (for similar examples, see Gilbert & Mulkay 1984, Machin & Carrithers 1996, Potter & Mulkay 1985, Potter & Wetherell 1987). Inconsistencies can also easily be found in the answers to survey questionnaires. However, such variation is usually managed by analytic strategies of restriction, for instance categorization, coding, and selective reading, because researchers

The identification of interpretative repertoires

The analysis of interpretative repertoires is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Interviews are not interpreted as stories having a clear and distinguishable message and meaning; instead, all the accounts produced by the participants are taken into consideration and analyzed to identify significant patterns of consistency and variation in them. Thereafter, the researcher starts to ask: What is the starting point behind this account? On what kinds of limitations of perspective is this

Statements and absences

According to Foucault (1972), each discourse is based on a few background assumptions that he calls statements. Statements are unspoken theories about the nature of things, and they are the necessary and implicit starting points behind a particular way of speaking about a topic. On the basis of the statements, a particular state of things is assumed (e.g., “if we gave up investing in education, the consequences would be serious”). The statements building a discourse provide a particular angle

Interviews as social texts

Discourse analysts are not interested in processes taking place either in individuals' minds or in reality. They concentrate on the regularities of language use: what kinds of descriptions and accounts of a topic are possible, what kinds of evaluations are they based on, how do different modes of accounting construct different versions of the topic or produce different kinds of truths, and what do these versions accomplish (Wetherell & Potter, 1988). It is seen that discourses are “historical

Validity and reliability in discourse analytic research

Alasuutari (1995) distinguishes between two different approaches in the analysis of qualitative interview data, the factist and specimen perspectives. In the factist approach, researchers want to find out about the actual behavior or attitudes of the participants. The analysis concentrates on the contents of interview answers, which reveal something about phenomena or processes occurring either in participants' inner realities or in external reality. These phenomena or processes are the true

Discourse analysis as a research method in lis

This article has described a method of analyzing qualitative interview data in which the basic analytic unit is an interpretative repertoire and which systematizes the discourses existing in a particular field or institutional context. Discourse analysis differs significantly from the hermeneutic and factist methods of reading qualitative interview data because it is, in a way, indifferent toward individual speakers' intentions. However, the hermeneutic research approach that aims at capturing

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