Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis

Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA), developed by Karen Tracy, is the methodological arm of grounded practical theory, an approach that sees the cultivating of communicative practices as the desired end goal for research. Grounded practical theory, growing out of Robert Craig's work on communication as a practical discipline, is similar to Glaser and Strauss's grounded theory. Like grounded theory, grounded practical theory begins on the ground, studying existing communicative practices. Unlike grounded theory, which builds explanatory social science theory, AIDA, with its grounded practical theory roots, works to reconstruct the problems, interaction strategies, and normative ideals of a practice so that participants will be able to reflect in sophisticated ways about how to act.

AIDA is a theory-method hybrid that melds the analytic moves of discourse analysis—attending to situated talk and texts—with the goal of understanding a practice. AIDA takes a rhetorical point of view, presuming that people can make reflective decisions about how to communicate in order to achieve or avoid certain outcomes. It is also a normative approach, or one that has potential usefulness as a guide for acting wisely.

AIDA focuses on communicative practices in institutional sites. At its core, practice can be thought of as a way of referring to activities that occur in specific places among specific kinds of people; practice is another way to refer to a speech event that participants take to frame a situation. Ordinary names given to practices often call up a constellation of site-people-purpose connections. School board meetings, departmental colloquia, and classroom discussions are examples of easily recognized practices related to educational settings. A practice can be taken as a unit of the social world for purposes of analysis. Communicative practices that AIDA has studied have included physician-patient consultations, school board meetings, law enforcement crisis negotiations, and routine business meetings. Since institutional practices involve multiple categories of people who are positioned differently within any practice, the problems of a practice will differ with participants' positions.

As a kind of discourse analysis, AIDA begins by taping interaction and making a transcript of the talk involved in the practice. These two moves are the hallmark of any discourse analysis. In contrast to conversation analysis, another discourse approach, AIDA has a strong ethnographic thread, which means that the researcher must have extensive knowledge about the routine actions and variation in the practice. This requires observation of the practice, including how participants talk with each other in the practice (the focal discourse) and how the practice is discussed or written about in relevant institutional documents.

A basic assumption of AIDA is that most communicative practices are shaped by interactional dilemmas. In academic discussions, for instance, graduate students and faculty members want to appear intelligent but do not want to be seen as self-aggrandized and out to show off. In school boards, the meeting chair wants to move the meeting along so that decisions can get made but wants to do so in a way that ensures citizens feel they have had a fair chance to be heard. As a result of the dilemmas that are part of all practices, a normative proposal about how participants ought to act needs to weigh the multiple goods to which a practice is committed.

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