Interpretative Repertoire

Social psychological DISCOURSE ANALYSIS aims in part to identify the explanatory resources that speakers use in characterizing events, taking positions, and making arguments. Interpretative repertoire is a term used to define those resources with regard to a particular theme or topic. Typically, these themes or topics are sought in interview data on matters of ideological significance, such as race, gender, and power relations. Interpretative repertoires occupy a place in analysis that seeks to link the details of participants' descriptive practices to the broader ideological and historical formations in which those practices are situated.

The essence of interpretative repertoires is that there is always more than one of them available for characterizing any particular state of affairs. Usually, there are two, used in alternation or in opposition, but there may be more. Repertoires are recurrent verbal images, metaphors, figures of speech, and modes of explanation. There is no precise definition or heuristic for identifying them. Rather, the procedure is to collect topic-relevant discourse data and examine them for recurrent interpretative patterns. This resembles the stages of developing GROUNDED THEORY, but it is a feature of interpretative repertoire analysis that it remains closely tied to the details of the discourse data, informed by the procedures of DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, rather than resulting in an abstract set of codes and categories. Interpretative repertoires are best demonstrated by examples.

The first use of the term was by Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay (1984) in a study of scientific discourse, where they discovered two contrasting and functionally different kinds of explanation. There was an empiricist repertoire—the impersonal, [Page 507]method-based, data-driven account of findings and theory choice typically provided in experimental reports. There was also a contingent repertoire—an appeal to personal motives, insights, and biases; social settings; and commitments—a realm in which speculative guesses and intuitions can operate and where conclusions and theory choice may give rise to, rather than follow from, the empirical work that supports them. Whereas the empiricist repertoire was used in making factual claims and supporting favored theories, the contingent repertoire was used in accounting for how and when things go wrong, particularly in rival laboratories, and with regard to discredited findings.

Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter (1992) conducted interviews with New Zealanders on matters of race and ethnicity. They identified, among others, a heritage repertoire in talk about culture and cultural differences. This consisted of descriptions, metaphors, figures of speech, and arguments that coalesced around the importance of preserving traditions, values, and rituals. An alternative therapy repertoire defined culture as something that estranged Maoris might need in order to be whole and healthy again. Rather than expressing different attitudes or beliefs across different speakers, each repertoire could be used by the same people, because each had its particular rhetorical uses. The therapy metaphor, for example, was useful in talk about crime and educational failure. Repertoires of this kind, although often contradictory, were typically treated by participants as unquestionable common sense each time they were used. This commonsense status of interpretative repertoires enables links to the study of ideology.

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