Katie MacMillan

The wow factor: preconceptions and expectations for data analysis software in qualitative research

Discussions on computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software often begin with the assumption that research will automatically be improved through the use of such software. Consequently, reviews frequently focus on practical concerns with the various software packages. Rather than theoretical considerations of its suitability to the method of analysis, such descriptions frequently treat software as the method of analysis. The following article calls for a clearer understanding of the role of software within research, with critical evaluation focusing on the methodological issues surrounding software use, as well on its technological innovations. The authors examine a number of factors that foster a tendency toward uncritical appraisal—including unrealistic expectations of the software as a methodology in itself; the treatment of qualitative analysis as a single, homogenized category; and the use of grounded theory as a legitimating link between tool and method.

Metaphor, idiom and ideology: the search for ‘no smoking guns’ across time

This article examines the idiom ‘smoking gun’ which has been much used in the controversy about the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is necessary to take a historical approach to understanding how metaphors might enter the political lexicon and how their usage and meaning might change over time. The passage from metaphor to idiom is often characterized in terms of a movement from ‘living’ metaphor to ‘dead’ metaphor. To understand how such a passage occurs, the current investigation draws upon Glucksberg’s ‘property attribution’ model of metaphor and contrasts it with Lakoff’s notable theory of metaphors. The ‘smoking gun’ idiom is traced to the Watergate controversy and its pragmatic uses in the political rhetoric of accusation are examined. It is suggested that there is nothing automatic in the use of such a phrase, as the rhetoric of blame can be countered by attempts to return the idiom from literal to metaphorical meaning. The ideological effects of the idiom ‘smoking gun’ are discussed and so, more generally, is the passage from metaphor to idiom in political discourse.

It's a scream: professional hearing and tape fetishism☆

Abstract This paper addresses the roles of taping and tapes in the arenas of academic Conversation and Discourse Analysis, and in a recent American trial of therapists which constituted a major development in the Recovered Memory/False Memory debate. Our argument is that two seemingly opposed features of the practice of hearing tapes—tape fetishism and professional hearing—are in fact interdependent. By tape fetishism we mean the treatment of the tape as a direct and evidential record of a past event, and thus as a quasi-magical time machine. Professional hearing is a trained method of hearing—as developed, for example, in conversation analysis. The joint operation of these features prevents us from seeing that all hearings are mediated, and that their reports are interpretative. The paper sets out to analyze modes of mediation: the analytic glossing of voiced but non-linguistic sounds (laughing, crying, screaming) and the use of rhetorical descriptions in media reports of taped sounds.

Lost in the Mall with Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcations and Demonstrations in the Psychologies

This article analyzes the demarcations made within psychology as a feature of the “memory wars”—the current controversy around “recovered” or “false” memory. As it is played out inside professional psychology, the dispute features clinical practitioners acting largely as proponents of recovered memory and experimentalists as proponents of false memory. Tracing a genealogy of this dispute back to a pair of original sites (Mesmer’s salon and Wundt’s laboratory), we show how the traditions’engagement in three modes of scientific demonstration varies systematically in terms of the modes of social relation inherent in their epistemic practices and the kinds of “reliable witness” these practices produce. We conclude that whereas the experimentalist tradition is able to transporttheir produced witnesses from oneto anothersite of demonstration with relative ease, the clinical tradition has much greater difficulty in doing so and thus has to engage in a variety of compensatory demonstrative strategies.

Theory-Building with Nud.Ist: Using Computer Assisted Qualitative Analysis in a Media Case Study

We examine Nud.ist software in terms of its ëtheory-buildingí properties in order to access the extent to which Nud.ist can be used, not only to develop content categories, but also to develop a research method using two potentially incompatible approaches. The methods, content analysis and discourse analysis, were used in a single case study on education news in the press. Our case study, on how news about education issues gets constructed and framed by the national press into generalized themes and narratives, was initially informed by an extensive content analysis of the news over a twelve month period. Having identified variations in press coverage, we then collected large quantities of media text on education issues, using Nud.ist to organize and to recode the subsequent data. Having categorized the news extracts our aim was to then explore whether Nud.ist could assist a discourse analysis of the text.

‘Designer families’: A discourse study of fact and accountability

Relations between event reports, explanations, and the reporter’s own credibility and involvement, are studied as discursively handled matters. A series of newspaper reports and commentaries is examined, concerning the controversial abortion of one of a pair of healthy twin foetuses. For two weeks the newspapers reported events, discussed issues, corrected errors, quoted sources, and in various ways handled issues of fact and responsibility concerning those events, including their own reporting of them. The approach taken is to analyse fact and accountability as the business being handled and managed in the texts themselves, rather than issues that the analysis attempts to resolve. This enables a study of how various descriptive and accounting categories are selected and deployed, including the reliability of sources, actors’ and informants’ intentions and motives, narrative uses of tense, journalistic categories such as the distinction between ‘news’ and ‘features’, and a wide variety of specific, rhetorically potent descriptions.