Stephen Gibson

Trying similarity, doing difference: The role of interviewer self-disclosure in interview talk with young people

Advocates of semi-structured interview techniques have often argued that rapport may be built, and power inequalities between interviewer and respondent counteracted, by strategic self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer. Strategies that use self-disclosure to construct similarity between interviewer and respondent rely on the presumption that the respondent will in fact interpret the interviewers behaviour in this way. In this article we examine the role of interviewer self-disclosure using data drawn from three projects involving interviews with young people. We consider how an interviewers attempts to ‘do similarity’ may be interpreted variously as displays of similarity or, ironically, as indicators of difference by the participant, and map the implications that this may have for subsequent interview dialogue. A particular object of concern relates to the ways in which self-disclosing acts may function in the negotiation of category entitlement within interview interactions.

English Identity and Ethnic Diversity in the Context of UK Constitutional Change

At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national identity with the constructs of territorial belonging, social inclusion and citizenship. Post-devolution survey data do not currently reveal a decline in British identity in England. Measures of attachment to Englishness vary as a function of ethnic origin of respondent, but also as a function of question wording. A qualitative interview study of young adult Pakistani-origin Muslims in Greater Manchester, north-west England, illustrates how Englishness may be understood to pertain variously to an exclusive cultural or racial category, or to an inclusive territorial entity or community of political interest. Ethnic constructions of English identity need not imply exclusive understandings of citizenship, but their meaning depends crucially on the ways in which nationality and identity are in turn understood in relation to matters of polity and civil society. Conversely, inclusive understandings of national identity do not guarantee the existence of effective ethnic integration or substantive ethnic equality.

For Queen and Country? National Frames of Reference in the Talk of Soldiers in England

Social scientists frequently use the iconic figure of the soldier who fights and dies for the nation to exemplify the power of processes of national identification. However, little work has considered how soldiers themselves orient to the possibility of being motivated by a desire to ‘serve the country’. The present study explored this through a series of interviews with members of the British Army and Territorial Army. Although in explicit talk about ‘the country’ the soldiers typically downplayed the importance of ‘serving the country’ as motivation, in discussing the prospect of a European army the national basis of armies was taken for granted. The findings are discussed in terms of the problematic nature of displays of English ‘patriotism’ or ‘pride’. It is argued that the relationship between national identity and military service, often assumed to be straightforward in social scientific texts, is oriented to as a delicate issue by soldiers themselves.

Doing your qualitative psychology project

Introduction and Aims of the Book - Cath Sullivan, Stephen Gibson and Sarah Riley Coming up with a Research Question - Kathryn Kinmond Planning and Ethics - Cath Sullivan and Sarah C.E Riley Managing the Project - Sarah C.E Riley and Nigel King Doing a Literature Review - Michael Forrester Collecting Your Data - Siobhan Hugh-Jones and Stephen Gibson Analysing Your Data - Stephen Gibson and Siobhan Hugh-Jones Evaluating Qualitative Research - Nollaig Frost and Kathryn Kinmond Writing up a Qualitative Project - Sarah C.E Riley What Next? - Cath Sullivan Overview and Conclusions: Be a Scholar - Stephen Gibson, Cath Sullivan and Sarah C.E Riley

Dilemmas of citizenship: Young people's conceptions of un/employment rights and responsibilities

This paper draws on the concept of ideological dilemmas in order to explore how a sample of young people constructed potentially contrary themes of liberal citizenship in discussions of un/employment. The study took place in the context of recent policy developments in the UK which have sought to place a renewed emphasis upon notions of responsible citizenship in relation to both welfare and education policy. A total of 58 participants were interviewed in 24 semi-structured group interviews. In response to direct questions on un/employment, participants could resolve dilemmas concerning welfare rights and the responsibility to contribute to society by emphasizing a criterion of effortfulness, thereby adopting a primarily individualistic explanation of unemployment. In other contexts however, this could be replaced by an emphasis on social explanations of unemployment. In particular, participants could treat immigration as a cause of unemployment. These findings are interpreted in terms of peoples capacity to construct rhetorical strategies based upon different ideological themes in particular contexts. They are discussed in relation to previous research on social policy discourse and recent debates regarding the appropriateness of seeking to identify ideological themes in discourse.

Historical Experiences, Collective Memory, and Willingness to Fight for One’s Country: Comments on Paez et al. (2008):

This article considers Paez et al.’s (2008) article “‘Remembering’ World War II and Willingness to Fight: Sociocultural Factors in the Social Representation of Historical Warfare Across 22 Societies.” Despite the importance of their focus on social representations of history and willingness to fight for one’s country, it is argued that Paez et al.’s article features a number of methodological flaws. Specifically, the way in which key variables (historical experience, collective memory, and willingness to fight for one’s country) are operationalized is especially problematic. The implications of these weaknesses for their conceptual conclusions are discussed briefly, as are the more general limitations of statistical analyses of survey data for addressing these issues.

Knowledge, autonomy and maturity: developmental and educational concerns as rhetorical resources in adolescents' discussions regarding the age of electoral majority in England

Recent debates concerning the age of electoral majority in the UK have focused on the levels of knowledge and maturity of young people. However, little research has explored the ways in which adolescents orient to these concerns themselves. In this article, we present analyses from a qualitative interview investigation in Northern England, and explore the ways in which our adolescent participants treated voting as a responsibility which should be exercised on the basis of a rational, autonomous and informed decision. Such arguments were frequently used to argue against a reduction in the age of electoral majority. These findings are discussed in relation to policy and educational debates in the UK.

Supporting the Troops, Serving the Country: Rhetorical Commonplaces in the Representation of Military Service

When Tony Blair announced the beginning of military action in Iraq on 20th March 2003, he concluded his address by saying, ‘As so often before on the courage and determination of British men and women serving our country the fate of many nations rest’ (BBC News, 2003, my italics). It is one of the basic contentions of this chapter that, in the United Kingdom at least, the representation of military service as ‘serving the country’ – or more broadly as involving some form of ‘patriotic’ sentiment – constitutes a cultural commonplace which can be invoked to perform particular rhetorical functions in relation to military service. Blair’s statement provides a particularly dramatic example of the characterization of military service as ‘serving our country’, coming as it does in the announcement which formally signalled the beginning of British involvement in a controversial war. Yet the dramatic nature of announcing the commencement of military action perhaps belies the more routine glossing of military personnel as ‘serving our country’. Indeed, this was perhaps one of the least controversial passages in this speech.

A Changing Culture? Qualitative Methods Teaching in UK Psychology.

This paper surveys the landscape of qualitative methods teaching in U.K. psychology. First, we provide an overview of the administrative framework for this teaching and highlight the positive development that is the stipulation by key national bodies that undergraduate psychology programs should teach qualitative methods. Second, we discuss an attempt to meet the needs for training and resources that resulted from these stipulations and note how recent changes in the higher education funding landscape have made it more difficult to meet these needs. Third, we review literature on the teaching of qualitative methods in U.K. psychology departments and note the relative paucity of studies addressing this issue. In conclusion, we suggest that the key issue remains the stubbornness of the “quantitative culture” in many departments. The official bureaucratic infrastructure of U.K. psychology teaching may now mandate that qualitative methods be taught, but the tentative conclusions that can be drawn from what literature there is suggest that this obscures various practices at the departmental level, with many programs still providing little more than tokenistic engagement with qualitative methods.

Obedience without orders: Expanding social psychology's conception of ‘obedience’

Psychologists have typically defined obedience as a form of social influence elicited in response to direct orders from an authority figure. In the most influential set of studies of obedience, conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, the orders at the disposal of the authority figure were a series of verbal prods. However, recent research has suggested that Milgrams experiments do not show people following orders. It has therefore been suggested that the experiments are not demonstrations of obedience. However, in the present paper, it is argued that rather than abandoning the idea that Milgrams work is a demonstration of obedience, it is in fact our conceptualization of obedience that is wrong. Obedience should not be understood as requiring direct orders from an authority figure. This argument is developed with reference to an extended case example from one of Milgrams experimental conditions in which a participant completed the experiment in the absence of direct orders. It is argued that such participants can still be understood as obedient if we consider the implicit demands of the system in which participants find themselves. The study concludes by presenting a new definition of obedience that omits the need for direct orders.