Drawing on the words of others at public hearings: Zoning, Wal-Mart, and the threat to the aquifer

This study examines two public hearings on a zoning proposal that would allow the construction of a Super Wal-Mart Center on a field over the town’s aquifer. Many citizens speak out against the zoning change because of the risk to drinking water, as well as other issues. Citizens face the speaker’s problem of how to make their presentations convincing, given the technical matters involved and the fact that Town Board members have likely already heard about these issues. Some speakers draw on the words of others in their presentations. Using another ’s words allows the speaker to cite an authoritative source or to respond to what another has said, to evaluate it, and often to challenge it. Speakers use other devices in addition to quotes, such as formulations, repetition, and membership categorizations to develop their evaluative stances in the reporting context. The study’s focus is the discursive construction and rhetoric of using others’ words for the speaker’s own purposes

When is forgetting not forgetting? A discursive analysis of differences in forgetting talk between adults with cystic fibrosis with different levels of adherence to nebulizer treatments

Forgetting is often cited as a reason why people struggle to adhere to treatments for chronic conditions. Interventions have tried to improve forgetting behavior using reminders. We used a discursive psychological approach to explore differences in how high and low adherers constructed forgetting their nebulizer treatments for cystic fibrosis. Interviews were conducted with 18 adults from a cystic fibrosis center in the United Kingdom. High adherers constructed forgetting treatments as occasional lapses in automaticity and temporary lapses in memory that they found easy to repair. Low adherers utilized forgetting to normalize more consistent nonadherence to treatments. However, it is important to contextualize forgetting as a discursive resource that helped these participants to negotiate moral discourses around adherence to treatment that reminder interventions cannot address; we therefore recommend a more behavioral, patient-focused, theory-driven approach to intervention development

Accounting for success and failure: a discursive psychological approach to sport talk

YesIn recent years, constructionist methodologies such as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) have begun to be used in sport research. This paper provides a practical guide to applying a discursive psychological approach to sport data. It discusses the assumptions and principles of discursive psychology and outlines the stages of a discursive study from choice of data through to transcription and analysis. Finally, the paper demonstrates a discursive psychological analysis on sport data where athletes are accounting for success and failure in competition. The analysis demonstrates that for both success and failure, there is an apparent dilution of personal agency, to either maintain their modesty in the case of success or to manage blame when talking about failure. It is concluded that discursive psychology has much to offer sport research as it provides a methodology for in-depth studies of supporting interactions

Drawing on the words of others at public hearings: Zoning, Wal-Mart, and the threat to the aquifer

This study examines two public hearings on a zoning proposal that would allow the construction of a Super Wal-Mart Center on a field over the town\u27s aquifer. Many citizens speak out against the zoning change because of the risk to drinking water, as well as other issues. Citizens face the speaker\u27s problem of how to make their presentations convincing, given the technical matters involved and the fact that Town Board members have likely already heard about these issues. Some speakers draw on the words of others in their presentations. Using another\u27s words allows the speaker to cite an authoritative source or to respond to what another has said, to evaluate it, and often to challenge it. Speakers use other devices in addition to quotes, such as formulations, repetition, and membership categorizations to develop their evaluative stances in the reporting context. The study\u27s focus is the discursive construction and rhetoric of using others\u27 words for the speaker\u27s own purposes. (Public hearings, risk, reported speech, quotes, Wal-Mart, discursive analysis, rhetoric)* © 2007 Cambridge University Press

Doing extra-ordinariness: trans-men's accomplishment of `authenticity' in the research interview

Discussions concerning transsexual identities consider the self representations of transsexuals as either determined through medical discourses and practices, and thus as constructed and inauthentic or, alternatively, as expressive of an interior and thus ‘authentic’ essential self. In contrast to each of these arguments, this article highlights the significance of social interaction to transsexual authenticity and explores, specifically, how this can be analytically captured and presented in the context of interview-based research. The article applies analytic techniques drawn from fine-grain discourse analysis to research interviews carried out with female to male transsexuals. Through this method of analysis transsexual authenticity is treated as neither determined through medical discourses nor as interior to the self, but rather as a ‘live’ interactional accomplishment. By revealing the discursive identity work undertaken by the interviewees, the article demonstrates a constructionist approach to transsexual authenticity which, contrary to essentialist critiques, succeeds in foregrounding transsexuals as ‘constructing subjects’