SEDIT online learning

6.5 Advanced section


In terms of data collection, you need to think about where appropriate discourse might be found that will help answer the research question. By identifying people, objects or events (relevant to your research question) and relevant publications (in which they are discussed), you can find appropriate data.

In terms of analysis, you need to consider the text as part of a wider discursive context, written for a particular audience who may read it in particular ways. How it is designed for that audience should be clear from the text, and the analysis should be based upon what is written. Nevertheless, one cannot understand the form and function of a text without considering its place within a wider discursive context.

As you might imagine, these two processes are not independent of each other. In the process of locating appropriate data, it is normal to consider the context in which relevant discourse is published. For example, like Wallwork and Dixon (2004), you might choose a newsworthy event, one that has led to significant press coverage (providing appropriate data), all of which is part of a wider public debate (so needs to be understood within this discursive context).

 Here is another example of a study that shows how appropriate data was found, and was then examined as part of a particular discursive context:

In one classic study, Edwards and Potter (1991) examined memory talk. They were interested in how memories are described in ways that make the account seem reliable. They identified a particular event in which what counted as a reliable memory had been the focus of a good deal of press coverage. The event in question had been a lobby meeting (an informal briefing with journalists) involving the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Following the meeting, there had been a major dispute between Lawson and the journalists over what he had said. In other words, this was a dispute about whose memory was reliable.

The extract that follows relates to part of that dispute, concerning a tape recorder, which was supposed to record what was said at the meeting. According to the Treasury, it had failed to work. This, in turn, had been disputed by journalists who had been at the meeting. For example, in the Sunday Mirror, one journalist reported:

Text 9 [Edwards and Potter, 1992: 61]

‘At one point I heard a click, and assumed the tape had run out. It was directly in front of me. When I looked to check, the spools were still spinning. The clicking I heard turned out to be Don Macintyre of the Sunday Telegraph, seated to my right, chewing a pen top’.

The form and function of the text is analysed in relation to the research question (e.g. how is a memory presented as reliable?), but as part of the discursive context (e.g. how is this being done in the context of a particular dispute about a particular event?).

However, when collecting data that discuss a particular event, one cannot assume that the discursive context is the same for all published texts that discuss the event. Different publications may discuss the same event in different ways. In this case, the main dispute in the press was about what really happened, but some of the press discussed what happened in relation to other concerns.

For example, here is an extract from The Guardian, which also refers to the lobby meeting, specifically to the consensus of the journalists who reported what happened:

Text 10: [Potter and Edwards, 1992: 62-63]

With that perfectly drilled unanimity which the lobby system shares with the Brigade of Guards … Two of the so-called heavies [i.e. the ‘quality press’] actually gave the story an identical headline … the stories underneath were equally similar in content

In relation to the research question (how are memories described in ways that seem reliable?), you might see this as an example of consensus (i.e. by describing how different individuals produced similar versions of what happened, the account is constructed as a reliable one). However, in this case, the discursive context is different, because The Guardian was critical of the lobby system. When it wrote about this dispute, it discussed different points, one of which was how such meetings led to inadequate reporting. In this context, read the extract again.