Discursive Psychology

Definition

Discursive psychology is an approach that focuses on how people interact with one another and, in particular, on the role of psychological words and issues in that interaction.

The Development of Discursive Psychology

Discursive psychology emerged in the early 1990s, drawing on ideas from the subdisciplines of conversation analysis, rhetoric, and constructionism. Early work offered new ways of understanding topics in social psychology, such as memory, attribution, and attitudes. Studies showed how, for example, people manage issues of motive, intention, and morality in their descriptions of actions and events. To illustrate what is involved in this kind of research, consider this illustrative example from a rape trial (Witness is the victim of the alleged rape, Counsel is the legal counsel for the defense of the alleged rapist, and Mr O is the defendant who has been accused of rape):

Counsel: And during the evening, didn't

Mr O come over to sit with you?

Witness: Sat at our table.

We can, no doubt, recognize that counsel's description suggests a familiarity and prior relationship between the defendant and the victim. It implies attitudes and motives that might make a rape conviction of the defendant harder to achieve. The witness's immediate correction offers an alternative that depersonalizes and de-familiarizes the relationship. It implies different attitudes and motives and perhaps a different moral status for the witness. These psychological matters are played out in the competing descriptions offered by the two parties to this interaction. This is the topic of discursive psychology.

Contemporary Discursive Psychology

Discursive psychology is unusual in social psychology in that it works primarily with audio and video recordings of actual interaction in natural settings rather than using experiments, questionnaires, or interviews. For example, recent work has focused on relationship counseling, child protection helplines, neighbor disputes, police interrogation, and different kinds of therapy, as well as everyday phone calls and interaction over family meals. Although it has continued to develop alternatives to mainstream social psychological topics, it has become increasingly focused on how actions are coordinated in institutional settings. For instance, how does a child protection officer working on a child protection helpline manage the possibly competing tasks of soothing a crying caller and simultaneously eliciting evidence sufficient for social services to intervene to help an abused child?

Discursive psychology has developed a rigorous methodological approach to records of interaction. It uses a form of transcription that captures features of speech delivery and has recently been able to exploit advances in digital audio and video to provide more powerful ways of working with large amounts of data.

Discursive psychology offers a very different way of addressing psychological issues than is common in much North American work. It has a different set of theoretical assumptions about mind and action, a different research method and even some rather different ideas about the nature of science. Its success has been based on a mix of theoretical innovation and a natural history approach that studies what people actually do in the settings in which they do it.