Discursive Psychology

Theory, Method and Applications

Sally Wiggins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473987852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Discursive Psychology is a theoretical and analytical approach used by academics and practitioners alike, widely applied, though often lost within the complicated web of discourse analysis. Sally Wiggins combines her expertise in discursive psychology with her clear and demystifying pedagogical approach to produce a book that is committed to student success. This textbook shows students how to put the methodology into practice in a way that is simple, engaging and practical.

Part One Theory

1 Discursive psychology

Chapter contents

• What is discursive psychology? 4
• What discursive psychology is not 6
• Core principles of discursive psychology 8
• What inspired discursive psychology? (The backstory) 16
• From there to here: how discursive psychology emerged and developed 23
• The ‘difficult relationship’ between discursive and cognitivist psychology 28

Discursive psychology (DP) is one of the most vibrant and exciting approaches to emerge within the social sciences in the past thirty years. It provides a lens through which we can examine the social world, to render visible the social practices through which people and their practices are made accountable and factual. It enables us to make sense of talk and text, of the activities that we are engaged in whenever we are interacting with other people. It captures the moments in which psychology is produced and made consequential in the social world. As such, not only does it offer a radical re-working of psychological concepts, it also holds enormous potential for applied research (indeed, it has been argued that it is, by its nature, already applied; see Chapter 10). This chapter will introduce you to the basic underlying principles of DP: what it is, what it isn’t, what inspired it, how it developed, and how it contrasts with cognitivist approaches within psychology. It will distil the core arguments of DP to provide you with a clear, practical way to get to grips with DP whether you are completely new to this field or building your analytical skills.

There are, however, two things that you need to know before you proceed. First, the theoretical arguments and principles that underpin DP are intellectually challenging; they require us to think and reflect on what we are studying, and why we are studying it. There will be ideas that challenge what we know about talk, about cognition, and indeed about reality. So yes, you will need to work hard. And yes, it might change you. You might never consider talk and interaction in the same way again. Second, there will be arguments, critiques and political rhetoric. This is a feisty and dynamic area of research to be in. Like any approach that challenges the mainstream, there are vehement critics of DP, and this is before you even consider the academic wrangling that goes on within the field of discourse analysis. As my Dad always says, it would be a dull world if we were all the same. So all this debate makes for a rather exciting and interesting place to be.

What is discursive psychology?

Let us begin, then, with the basics, and start with a definition:

Discursive psychology is a theoretical and analytical approach to discourse which treats talk and text as an object of study in itself, and psychological concepts as socially managed and consequential in interaction.

The version of DP that is the focus of this book was developed by Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, at Loughborough University in the UK, following from earlier work developed with Margaret Wetherell. It treats talk and text as, first and foremost, part of social practices rather than as a reflection of inner cognitive processes. It treats discourse as doing things in interaction and examines the ways in which psychological concepts are produced and made consequential in interaction.

DP is a form of discourse analysis, and as such is part of a much broader framework of approaches for understanding discourse (see Chapter 2). It is interdisciplinary, cutting across disciplinary boundaries (such as between psychology and linguistics) and within subject boundaries (such as between the topics of memory and attributions in psychological research). As such, it is predominantly a qualitative approach, in that it analyses words, but is not against quantification. It does, however, challenge the notion that psychological practices can be reduced to numbers. In this sense, it is more akin to a methodology than a method: a programme of work (Edwards, 2012) or a meta-theory (Edwards & Potter, 1992; see also Potter, 2003). There are a set of core principles that underpin the approach DP takes to research and analysis, and when we use DP we need to embrace both the theoretical assumptions and the methods of doing research. This means that it cannot be taken ‘off the shelf’ as just another way of analysing discursive data, but it also means that it is a coherent, theoretically grounded, and rigorous approach to research.

DP is concerned with psychological issues, but psychology as it is lived by people in everyday life – for example, how people make the minds, identities or emotions of others relevant in interaction – by their practices and social interactions rather than their individual thoughts or experiences. It therefore starts with social practices rather than psychological states. Psychological concepts become the object of study, not the framework that determines theory and analysis. So a psychological concept such as ‘attitudes’ or ‘food preference’ is not treated a priori as a fact; instead, the focus is on how this concept is described, invoked and consequential for social interaction. DP does not try to ‘get inside’ people’s minds or attempt to understand their motivations or attitudes. This is a subtle but important difference. Like other psychological concepts, the issue of cognition is treated as an analytical object (something we study without first making assumptions about what it is) rather than an analytical framework (something we make assumptions about and which then directs what we study).

Let us consider an example to illustrate what DP is and why we might use it. The short extract below represents a brief section of conversation between a boy (Joseph) and his Mum at the family dinner table. Some of the family members have finished eating, but Joseph still has quite a lot of food on his plate. The transcript here is presented in turn-by-turn order (as you will see later in the book) but is simplified to make it easier to read:

Mum: could you eat a bit more Joseph please, instead of staring into space

Joseph: no, I don’t like it

Mum: a little bit more if you don’t mind

Joseph: no ((shakes head))

There are many ways in which we might approach this piece of interaction, to understand what is going on between the mother and her son. We might try to figure out why Mum is asking her son to eat more; perhaps she is concerned that he is not eating enough or she may be trying to avoid wasting food. We might also approach it from Joseph’s point of view: why does he not like it? Is there another reason that he does not feel like eating it? Alternatively, we might look more broadly at the cultural conventions that determine how food is eaten in a particular way, with family members sitting round a dinner table, and with it being normative that a mother (or parent) is in part responsible for how much, and what, a child eats.

In each of these possible interpretations, we would be making assumptions about what people are thinking or feeling, or about the existence of cultural norms that shape how we eat. These interpretations are potentially limitless, and hard to evidence from the basis of a single piece of conversation. In contrast, DP focuses attention on the social interaction at just this point in time: on what actions are being performed (requests to eat more food, refusals) as well as the psychological business that is being managed (Joseph’s appetite and his food preferences, as well as Mum’s authority to ask him to eat more food). For example, what is being accomplished when Joseph says ‘I don’t like it’, as an addition to the ‘no’? We do not have to look ‘behind’ the words to find out what is going on here. We can examine the interaction as a piece of interaction, in a specific context, and as consequential for the people therein. In this case, it is what gets eaten, and who is held accountable for not eating food. As we will see later, there are problems in treating words as simply a reflection of people’s thoughts and experiences. Instead, we can examine how realities are produced through the ways in which people live their lives and through the discursive practices that make up these lives.

Box 1.1: A comment about names

As we will see in Chapter 2 (see also Box 1.5) there is more than one version of discursive psychology, just as there are many forms of discourse analysis. One of the ways in which we can distinguish between these forms is through reference to the names of researchers who have developed, or who use, those approaches. For example, we might refer to the form of DP advocated in this book as ‘Edwards and Potter DP’. When reading discourse analytic research, it can be helpful to check which names are referred to, to help you identify which form of DA they are using, if this is not specified. The problem with this, however, is that it risks promoting some researchers at the expense of others, and associating an approach with individuals rather than as a collective body of work. Yet DP was the culmination of a number of different interdisciplinary ideas and research findings. It is not owned by anyone; it is not a ‘thing’. Instead, it is a theoretical and analytical approach, a way of examining the world in a particular way; a type of camera lens through which we can investigate life. So use names to help familiarise yourself with DP, but remember that researchers can move between approaches, and approaches themselves will grow and evolve.

What discursive psychology is not

While discursive psychology provides a unique and powerful means of understanding discourse, interaction and psychology, as with any approach there are limits to what it can do. Being aware of these limitations – as well as the possible misconceptions of DP that have emerged over the years (see also the FAQ section) – will better equip you to develop your own competence in this area.

Discursive psychology is not:

• A critique of psychology. DP does challenge a body of psychological research – and particularly, that which relies on a cognitivist interpretation of language in social settings – but psychology as a discipline is much broader than this. DP is not a threat to psychology, and should instead be regarded as a different way of doing psychology.
• The application of discourse analysis to psychology. Psychology is a very broad discipline, and there are numerous theoretical and analytical approaches within the discipline; so there is no single notion of ‘psychology’ for discourse analysis to be applied to. Instead, we can understand DP as a re-working of the very objects of psychology itself, of the concepts used by psychologists to define individuals and their behaviours. So it begins with people’s practices in everyday life, and in how psychological concepts (e.g., attitude) or processes (e.g., appetite) are enacted and contested in social interaction.
• A causal account. DP does not provide evidence for why things occur in terms of underlying causal factors. This is because it is argued that discourse constructs rather than reflects reality, so what people say is not a reflection of what has happened or what their intentions are (see ‘core principles’ section). What it can do, instead, is to identify patterns, norms and regular features of interaction that might be produced in different settings. In that way, it can account for what happens (i.e., provide an explanation for) but not predict or determine what will happen (i.e., suggest a causal relationship).
• A research method. DP is a methodology, not a method, in that it provides a theoretical framework for understanding discourse and interaction, and that in turn provides for a particular way of doing research. But it is not a research method that can be combined simply with other methods or theories. It requires an understanding and application of specific theoretical principles. In the same way, other research methodologies also make assumptions about the world and what we can know about it, but they may not make these explicit. DP does; it is very clear about how we can understand discourse and how this plays out in practice.
• A psychology of language. Many textbooks on psychological research on language focus on issues such as how we develop language (as babies and infants), how we mentally process and understand meaning, language and communication, and how we produce speech. There is often very little content about how we use language in everyday social settings; much of psycholinguistic work is based on laboratory studies or situations that are set up to limit variables and prescribe what can be said or understood. The use of the term ‘discourse’, by contrast, highlights the focus on language in use, and to capture both talk (spoken) and text (written) language, in its many forms.
• Behaviourism. DP focuses on talk and text as social practices, and examines interaction between people rather than individual ‘behaviours’ as separate events. Unlike behaviourism, DP does not reduce discourse and interaction to an individualistic level and it works with participants’ own categories and sense-making practices (not with analysts’ categories about inputs and outputs). Unlike behaviourism, DP does not treat psychological concerns as analytically unavailable. Quite the contrary; these are analysed in terms of how they are invoked, constructed and made consequential in social interaction.
• Impression management. Goffman’s theories of the presentation of self and impression management assumed a ‘real’ self behind the mask and performance in social settings, and that our behaviours are motivated by maintaining a particular role or ‘face’. By contrast, DP argues that there is no single real self that is being maintained (it is a relativist approach; see ‘core principles’) and that our identities are multiple and produced in interaction. It also argues that there is no way of getting ‘behind’ the discourse; that motivations are analysable in interaction, not hidden somewhere internally.
• Linguistic relativity. This is the argument that language shapes thought. It is sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. By contrast, DP is concerned with discourse in social interaction and how it is constructed to accomplish particular actions in specific contexts. It makes no claims about ‘thought’ as an internal object, and there are theoretical issues around assuming that thought can be shaped in particular ways. It treats talk-in-interaction as a flexible resource, not one variable that can be tracked for its impact on another.

Core principles of discursive psychology

This section outlines the core principles that make up the meta-theory of DP, and from which all other features of DP follow. So take your time working through these, and ensure that you are clear about what they mean and their implications for examining discourse before you move on to the other sections. In Chapter 6, you will be able to see how these principles work in practice in the analysis of data, but for now we will use the following piece of interaction to help work through some of these issues. This interaction takes place between three women (Kate, Lucy and Martha) – all friends since school – now in their early 20s and spending the evening at Kate’s house. They have just finished drinking one bottle of wine, and Kate offers to go to the local shop to buy another bottle. The transcript has been simplified here for ease of reading, but overlapping talk (noted here by square brackets [ ]) and pauses of one second (1.0) or less than one se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Theory
• 1 Discursive psychology
• 2 DP and other forms of discourse analysis
• Part Two Methods
• 3 Developing a research question
• 4 Data collection and management
• 5 Transcribing and coding data
• 6 Analysing data using DP
• 7 Discursive devices
• 8 Writing up and presenting DP analyses
• Part Three Applications
• 9 DP topics, case studies and project ideas
• 10 Applications and future developments
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about discursive psychology
• Glossary
• References
• Index