Wednesday, September 25, 2013
My Reflections on Chapters 6-10 of Rapley: Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis.
In reading chapters 6-10 of Rapely, specifically through reading chapter 6, I realized I don't feel comfortable with this overwhelming emphasis on "naturally-occurring" talks. What is bothering me in this regard is that as a discourse researcher, when I enter the field and as I am recommended to focus on emerging patterns in naturally-occurring talk, how could I make sure that the talk is happening on he track that might sort of provide answers to my research question. For instance, for my data analysis project in this course, I am planning to attend a meeting of a group of entrepreneurs in Knoxville to observe and to record their interactions. I am not still clear, what I am going to look for in these interactions and even for example, if I want to investigate entrepreneurial identity, how can I make sure that the interactions and discourses that happen in that specific meeting, guide me towards seeing patterns in terms of entrepreneurial identity. However, I assume that I should go to this meeting with my broad research question in hand but I am not sure if that specific conversation will be helpful to me or not. This is very different with interview sessions when I can purposefully prime interviewees to talk about the topic of importance to me.
In chapter 7 where Rapely talks about exploring conversations with documents, I am a bit confused. I can see how documents like letters to shareholders have been previously used in management & organization research but the majority of this work has been conducted via content analysis in which I assume the sequence and various turns of talk is not really important. So, I am still thinking of how documents can be used in conversation analysis in my field of study.
In chapter 10, where Rapley talks about the validity of this type of research, I am not easily justified that taking the several steps recommended by Rapley, will justify the audience that my interpretations are credible and plausible and that they are not just my interpretations in the way I want and prefer to see the world and project it to others.
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"I am not still clear, what I am going to look for in these interactions and even for example, if I want to investigate entrepreneurial identity, how can I make sure that the interactions and discourses that happen in that specific meeting, guide me towards seeing patterns in terms of entrepreneurial identity. However, I assume that I should go to this meeting with my broad research question in hand but I am not sure if that specific conversation will be helpful to me or not. This is very different with interview sessions when I can purposefully prime interviewees to talk about the topic of importance to me." Yes, you are exactly right. You do have to be okay with that shift in focus - and not everyone is. But I suspect, though, that there will be a lot of interesting actions going on during that meeting that will be somehow related to entrepreneurial identity - but in ways different from what you get in interviews. It will be fun to find out!
ReplyDeleteI would guess that there are all sorts of documents in a business setting that are an integral part of the workplace. What the letters to shareholders are "doing" would be really interesting - looking at word choice and metaphor, for example. What is included? What is left out?
It does sound like you are having a bit of a hard time accepting qualitative research in general. That's understandable, as it is a very different worldview from quantitative research and the claims that we make are quite different and rest on different assumptions. You are right - hard core quantitative researchers may never accept discourse analysis work - because they do want to believe that there is an "objective truth" in the world that is "discoverable" by using neutral methods. Discourse researchers do not believe this.