Discursive Psychology

Discursive psychology (DP) starts with psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. It is not just psychology as it appears in interaction; rather, it understands psychological language, and broader “mental practices,” as organized for action and interaction. It is a specifically discursive psychology because discourse—talk and texts—is the primary medium for social action. Part of its focus is on the organized resources used to build actions.

DP works with three fundamental principles in its approach to discourse:

• 1.
  Action orientation. DP analyzes discourse as the primary means through which actions are done and interaction is coordinated. Actions are seen as typically embedded in broader practices. This focus on action rather than cognition differentiates it theoretically from cognitive psychology and underpins the analytic focus on discourse rather than experimental comparisons of input and output.
• 2.
  Situation. DP treats discourse as situated in three complementary senses. First, it is organized sequentially, such that the primary environment for any utterance is the immediately prior utterance and the new utterance provides the context for what comes next. Second, discourse is situated institutionally, highlighting the potential relevance of institutional identities (e.g., counselor, client) and tasks (e.g., assessing trauma, offering advice). Third, discourse is situated rhetorically, such that any description can be inspected for how it counters relevant alternative descriptions (often from the immediately prior talk).
• 3.
  Construction. In DP, discourse is understood as both constructed and constructive. Discourse is constructed from resources (e.g., words, membership categories, rhetorical commonplaces, interpretive repertoires). Discourse is constructive of versions of the world, including versions of events and actions, settings and structures, psychological entities and experiences. DP studies both the actions done with these constructions and the way in which these constructions are built to be stable, objective, and independent of the speaker.

Methodologically, DP performs intensive qualitative studies of audio or video records of interaction in everyday and institutional settings. Research will typically study a corpus of examples of some phenomenon and will work simultaneously with the digitized video or audio and a full Jeffersonian transcription (named after its developer, Gail Jefferson). Increasingly, DP has drawn on the analytic power of conversation analysis. Notable research areas have included counseling and therapy talk, helpline interaction, mediation, police interrogation, food, and interaction. At the same time, DP has offered new approaches to familiar social science topics, such as race and gender, attitudes and scripts, social representations and emotion, and also has formulated new topics, such as the role of descriptions in the formation of actions, the management of stake and interest in delicate circumstances, and the way in which talk is organized to display psychological states.

DP can be illustrated through Derek Edwards's research on script formulations. Traditional social psychology treats scripts as mentally encoded templates that guide action. DP focuses on the prior issue of how descriptions are produced to present actions as following standardized routines. Consider the following fragment from a couples' counseling session:

Jefferson's transcription system has been used here. It marks features of the delivery of talk that have been found to be relevant to interaction in a large body of conversation analytic work. In this extract, underlining is used for emphasis; colons mark extensions of the preceding sounds; arrows show marked upward or downward pitch shifts; dashes mark cutoff sounds; numbers in parentheses show delay timed in seconds; and equals signs mark hearably fast transitions or rush-throughs.

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