Understanding Social Influence Differently: A Discursive Study of Livery Yards

The present thesis offers a synthetic, discursive psychological investigation into social influence, as manifested in an everyday context - a livery yard in the south-west of England. Drawing on insights from Conversation Analysis, Discursive Psychology and Critical Discursive Psychology, the thesis demonstrates the limitations of traditional social psychological approaches to social influence, especially in terms of our understanding of how influence manifests itself in everyday life. The thesis argues that in order to understand social influence in practice it is important to study language in action, that is, the discursive and interactional practices through which influence is produced and through which people orient towards the possibility of influence. Also, the thesis examines how influence is mediated by other social actions including the demonstration of competence, exercise of leadership or the production of identity. The research presented in the thesis is based on the analysis of over 200 hours of audio and video data collected over eleven months of ethnographic work in a livery yard. The livery yard was chosen as the appropriate setting because social influence, in terms of giving, accepting or resisting advice, is a frequent concern both for the owners and the users of the livery yard. Also, the nature of the interactions in a livery yard, and the complexity of the social relationships between the management, staff and the customers meant that different forms of advice giving and orientations to influence could be readily observed, recorded and analysed. By examining how social influence is produced, oriented to and resisted in an everyday context, and by promoting a synthetic discursive approach to this quintessential social psychological topic, the thesis offers a timely critique of traditional research into social influence and contributes to the broader project of re-specifying social psychology in discursive, social constructionist terms

Group Analysis in Practice: Narrative Approaches

This is the final version of the article. Available from Institut für Qualitative Forschung via the URL in this record.Working in groups is increasingly regarded as fruitful for the process of analyzing qualitative data. It has been reported to build research skills, make the analytic process visible, reduce inequalities and social distance particularly between researchers and participants, and broaden and intensify engagement with the material. This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on group qualitative data analysis by presenting a worked example of a group data analysis of a short extract from an interview on serial migration from the Caribbean to the UK. It describes the group's working practices and the different analytic resources drawn upon to conduct a narrative analysis. We demonstrate the ways in which an initial line-by-line analysis followed by analysis of larger extracts generated insights that would have been less available to individual researchers. Additionally, we discuss the positioning of group members in relation to the data and reflect on the porous boundary between primary and secondary analysis of qualitative data.With grateful thanks to the participants, without whose generosity in sharing their stories, the study would not have been possible. We are also pleased to acknowledge funding of the NOVELLA research node from the Economic and Social Research Council that enabled engagement with methodological, theoretical and substantive issues

Analysing qualitative data in groups: process and practice.

Part of the Narrative Research In Action series