Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 485
acknowledged the boy, saying ‘‘Doozu,’’ while smiling at the mother who
waited at the bottom of the stairs for her son.
It turns out that the child was mimicking, in phrase and diction, the formal
way that an adult man might say thank you with great emphasis in Japanese.
Had I been able to tape that one small discourse event, I’m sure that there
would have been enough exegesis by my Japanese colleagues at the museum
to have produced a book on socialization of men and women into the ways of
bowing and of saying thanks.
Formal discourse analysis, in fact, involves taping interactions and careful
coding and interpretation. Howard Waitzkin and his colleagues (1994:32)
taped 336 encounters involving older patients and primary-care internists.
(The physicians included some in private practice, some who worked in a
teaching hospital, and some who worked both in private practice and in hospital
outpatient departments.)
Waitzkin et al. randomly chose 50 of these encounters for intensive study.
They had each of the 50 encounters transcribed, verbatim—with all the ‘‘uhs,’’
pauses, and whatnot that occur in real discourse—and two research assistants
checked the accuracy of the transcriptions against the original tape.
During the interpretation phase, research assistants read the transcripts and
noted the ones that dealt with aging, work, gender roles, family life, leisure,
substance use, and socioemotional problems—all areas in which the researchers
were interested at the time. The assistants read through the transcripts and
tagged instances where either the doctors or the patients ‘‘made statements
that conveyed ideological content or expressed messages of social control’’
(ibid.:328).
To illustrate their interpretive approach to discourse analysis, Waitzkin et al.
go through two texts in detail. They use the same method as that used in biblical
exegesis: A chunk of text is laid out, followed by commentary involving
all the wisdom and understanding that the commentators can bring to the
effort. For example, Waitzkin et al. produce this snippet of interaction between
a doctor (D) and his patient (P), an elderly woman who has come in for a
follow-up of her heart disease:
P: Well I should—now I’ve got birthday cards to buy. I’ve got seven or eight
birthdays this week—month. Instead of that I’m just gonna write ’em and
wish them a happy birthday. Just a little note, my grandchildren.
D: Mm hmm.
P: But I’m not gonna bother. I just can’t do it all, Dr.—
D: Well.
P: I called my daughters, her birthday was just, today’s the third.
D: Yeah.