essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– DISCOURSE ANALYSIS –––––––––– 207newspaper articles, extracts from health care brochures, and transcripts of conversations. Theseare ‘natural’ texts in the sense that they are the products of mundane interactions or everydaytext production. However, in the case of organizational research, while there are manyopportunities to collect such everyday texts, such as in-house magazines and snatches ofconversation, most often the researcher has a specific question in mind and will probably becollecting ‘text’ in the form of interview data.Interview data needs to be fully transcribed for analysis. Some discourse analystsrecommend the use of special notations to indicate pauses, overlap between speakers, andother paralinguistic features of the text. The method set out in this chapter does not requirethis amount of detail in the transcription, as the focus for analysis is on content, more thanprocess (see Hollway, 1989 for a further discussion of this issue).SAMPLE AND SAMPLE SIZE ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––If collecting text for discourse analysis via interviews, typically only a relatively small sampleof respondents will be involved in the study. This is because the focus is on the text, not theindividual and because the aim is to provide an in-depth analysis that is focused onexplanation, rather than generalization. However, as has already been mentioned, if attemptingto identify a specific discourse, it is important to be able to demonstrate that the discourse doesexist as a set of regulated statements. If this is to be achieved through examining whatrespondents say, then it is advisable to use a grounded theory approach to sampling (Glaserand Strauss, 1967).Thus, for example, if the researcher believed he or she had identified a discourse that wasbeing used to construct a specific version of some particular social object (say nursing practice),he or she would then need to interview a number of other nurses, from differentorganizational and personal contexts (for example, age, seniority, role, ward type, and so on)in order to identify whether this discourse was also used by individuals in these groups, orwhether different discourses were used. The contextual features of the text production canthen be used in the analysis to explain any variations thus identified.Analysing how a discourse is used to construct a certain version of reality and explainingwhy it is being used in this way can be carried out on one text or several, depending on thescope and scale of the research. In the application example below, for instance, the analysisis carried out on one extract, though the discourses used in the analysis were identified usinga larger sample of 16 participants.CONDUCTING AN INTERVIEW IN A DISCOURSE ANALYTIC STUDY ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In critical discourse analysis, it is vital that the researcher realizes that no matter how informallythey present themselves and no matter what their own epistemological stance is to theknowledge production process, the participant is likely to position the researcher accordingto their own personal beliefs. Simply put, the participant makes a social reading of theinterview and the interviewer and this has a fundamental effect on the nature of the dataproduced, which needs to be accounted for within the analysis. This is illustrated in theapplication example below.