Jonathan Potter

Qualitative interviews in psychology: problems and possibilities

This paper distinguishes a series of contingent and necessary problems that arise in the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of open-ended or conversational qualitative interviews in psychological research. Contingent problems in the reporting of interviews include: (1) the deletion of the interviewer; (2) the conventions for representing interaction; (3) the specificity of analytic observations; (4) the unavailability of the interview set-up; (5) the failure to consider interviews as interaction. Necessary problems include: (1) the flooding of the interview with social science agendas and categories; (2) the complex and varying footing positions of interviewer and interviewee; (3) the orientations to stake and interest on the part of the interviewer and interviewee; (4) the reproduction of cognitivism. The paper ends with two kinds of recommendation. First, we argue that interviews should be studied as an interactional object, and that study should feed back into the design, conduct and analysis of interviews so that they can be used more effectively in cases where they are the most appropriate data gathering tools. Second, these problems with open-ended interviews highlight a range of specific virtues of basing analysis on naturalistic materials. Reasons for moving away from the use of interviews for many research questions are described.

Focus Group Practice

Focus Groups and Interaction Producing Informality Producing Participation Producing Opinions Producing Useful Opinions Producing Varied Opinions From Practice to Strategy

Death and Furniture: the rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism

and participants in the 15th Discourse and Reflexivity Workshop (University of Sheffield, September 1992) for making helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In this version pages are counted according to the published numbers with breaks following the published version.

Discourse: Noun, verb or social practice?

This chapter comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker’s approach is criticized for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects, (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice and (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of ‘interpretative repertoires’ over ‘discourses’ as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Social Representations and Discursive Psychology: From Cognition to Action

This article compares and contrasts the way a set of fundamental issues are treated in social representations theory and discursive psychology. These are: action, representation, communication, cognition, construction, epistemology and method. In each case we indicate arguments for the discursive psychological treatment. These arguments are then developed and illustrated through a discussion of Wagner, Duveen, Themel and Verma (1999) which highlights in particular the way the analysis fails to address the activitiesdone by people when they are producing representations, and the epistemological troublesthat arise from failing to address the role of the researcher’s own representations.

Discursive Psychology: Between Method and Paradigm

Hammersley (2003) criticizes a particular style of discourse research for developing as a distinct paradigm, yet lacking the coherence a paradigm would require. He suggests a range of problems in relation to constructionism, reflexivity and the ‘thin’ model of the human actor, and argues instead for methodological eclecticism in which discourse analytic methods are supplementary to alternatives. This commentary highlights a range of confusions and misunderstandings in this critique. In particular, it highlights the way discourse analytic work is connected to a range of theoretical notions, most fundamentally in its theorizing of discourse itself as a medium oriented to action. It identifies important sources of incoherence that can arise when mixing discourse analytic and more traditional methods. It reiterates the virtues of constructionism, particularly when considering the operation of descriptions, stresses the value of exploring (rather than ignoring) reflexive issues, and emphasizes the rich and nuanced approach to psychology that has been developed in this tradition.

Directives: entitlement and contingency in action

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s (2008) analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children (three—eight-year-olds). While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded (more entitled and less contingent) directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same.

Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices

This chapter reviews the major theoretical and methodological features of discursive social psychology and illustrates the scope and nature of this approach through showing the way it can respecify the social psychology of attitudes. It reviews discourse research on attitude variability; it describes conversation analytic studies on the way evaluations are managed in interaction and shows how our understanding of political oratory can be improved; it discusses the way evaluations are bound up with broader, culturally-defined systems of discourse; it discusses the relation between assessments and factual accounts; and finally it shows how a discursive approach can rework notions of function, consistency, vested interest and emotion.

Two kinds of natural

to do with status of data and the various ways in which notions of ‘contrived’, ‘natural’, ‘naturalistic’ and so on have been used. She helpfully highlights a range of different issues and complexities, and identifies some apparent inconsistencies. It is right that more explication goes on in this area. Nevertheless, I believe that what appear to be inconsistencies arise mainly from discourse researchers using the notions to do two rather different jobs. Specifically, the contrived/natural distinction has been used to highlight a preference for materials that are not ‘got up’ or produced for a specific research task. At the same time, discourse and conversation researchers are well aware of the limited sense of natural being developed here, and have offered cautions to that effect. They have also noted that it is possible to naturalize the interaction in an experiment, questionnaire or focus group; that is, treat it as a topic for interactional study. Yet treating method as topic is not the same as using it to find something out. Let me consider these points in a little more detail.

Making psychology relevant

This article describes some key features of a discursive psychological approach. In particular, discursive psychology is analytically focused on the way psychological phenomena are practical, accountable, situated, embodied and displayed. It describes its particular version of constructionism and its distinctive approach to cognition as points of contrast with a range of other perspectives, including critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Finally, it describes three areas where discursive psychology is involved with social critique: work on categories and prejudice, issues to do with cognitivism and its problems, and work developing a discursive psychology of institutions.