5 Discursive Psychology Sally Wiggins and Jonathan Potter INTRODUCTION a moment of understanding are displayed in a piece of interaction in a particular setting. Discursive psychology begins with psychol- Discursive psychology is not focused on ogy as it faces people living their lives. discourse because it is interested in the psy- It studies how psychology is constructed, chology of language as a topic amongst understood and displayed as people interact others (prejudice, social influence, etc.) as in everyday and more institutional situations. it has been traditionally understood. Indeed, How does a speaker show that they are not it takes a very different approach to lan- prejudiced, while developing a damning ver- guage than is common in psychology. It is sion of an entire ethnic group? How are focused on discourse because it is the primary actions coordinated in a counselling session arena for action, understanding and intersub- to manage the blame of the different par- jectivity. It starts with a view of people as ties for the relationship breakdown? How is social and relational, and with psychology upset displayed, understood and receipted in as a domain of practice rather than abstract a call to a child protection helpline? Ques- contemplation. Its methodological principles tions of this kind require us to understand the follow from its meta-theoretical, theoretical kinds of things that are ‘psychological’ for and conceptual arguments, although these people as they act and interact in particular are further supported through their empirical settings – families, workplaces and schools. fruitfulness. And this in turn encourages us to respecify This chapter will introduce the perspective the very object psychology. Discursive psy- of discursive psychology. We outline theo- chology does not start with a ‘technical’ story retical and methodological features, using of mental processes, behavioural regularities examples from current research to elucidate or neural events that are happening some- our arguments. In doing so, we demon- where below and behind the business of inter- strate the potential influence and future action. Rather it starts with the categories, development of discursive research methods constructions and orientations through which within psychology. We start by outlining a sense of agency, say, or severe distress, or the theoretical and intellectual roots of [19:23 6/9/2007 4953-Willig-Ch05.tex] Paper Size: a4 WILLIG/STAINTON-ROGERS: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology Page: 73 73–90 74 METHODS discursive psychology (occasionally, DP) and Stringer and Wetherell (1984). There is also its emergence within psychology. We then an important debt to the work of Wittgenstein focus on contemporary issues and debates. and linguistic philosophy (see Potter, 2001). For example, what is the importance of This is partly a direct influence and partly everyday practices? What is the status of comes through the important philosophical cognitive notions in DP? And how does it respecification of psychology developed by deal with seemingly intractable topics such as Harré (Harré and Gillett, 1994). Finally, it embodiment? We will overview key studies owed a major debt to the sociology of sci- to highlight what is distinctive about DP. The entific knowledge and in particular Gilbert chapter will also detail the practicalities of and Mulkay (1984). This is a potentially DP research, from the initial stages of gaining confusing mix; discipline was provided by ethical approval and collecting data, through taking as its major focus discourse – talk and to transcription and analysis. Examples from texts – and, in particular, the ways in which our own research on eating practices will be discourse is oriented to actions within set- used to illustrate some of these stages in more tings, the way representations are constructed detail. Finally, we consider limitations of the and oriented to action, and a general caution approach, and speculate as to the future of about explanations of conduct based in the discursive psychology. cognition of individuals. Although Potter and Wetherell (1987) out- lined many of the features later refined in THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCURSIVE discursive psychology it is worth highlight- PSYCHOLOGY OUT OF DISCOURSE ing two areas of difference as they have major ANALYSIS methodological implications. First, a major focus of Potter and Wetherell (1987) was on Discursive psychology was developed out the identification of the structured discursive of a particular form of discourse analysis resources that underlie and sustain interac- that was outlined most fully in Potter and tion. There are different possibilities for the Wetherell’s (1987) highly influential book analysis of resources. While ethnomethodol- Discourse and Social Psychology. This pio- ogists have focused on the role of member- neered qualitative discourse research in psy- ship categories (e.g. Hester and Eglin, 1997), chology, providing the basis for some of rhetoricians, and particularly Billig (1996), the first qualitative papers in empirical jour- have focused on rhetorical commonplaces. nals such as the British Journal of Social However, Potter and Wetherell developed Psychology and European Journal of Social the notion of interpretative repertoires from Psychology. Potter and Wetherell’s book Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) earlier work. reconceptualized the topic of social psy- Interpretative repertoires are clusters of terms chology and outlined an alternative method- organized around a central metaphor, often ological approach that could be used in used with grammatical regularity. They are place of the experiments and question- flexibly drawn on to perform different actions naires that had been the mainstay of pub- (see Edley, 2001). lished psychological work at that point. It We can illustrate this notion with the exam- drew on conversation analytic work on both ple of Wetherell and Potter’s (1992) major everyday and institutional settings (Atkinson study of racist discourse in New Zealand and Drew, 1979; Levinson, 1983). It also and, in particular, its distinct way of address- built on post-structuralist ideas. Some of ing the notion of culture. They did not treat these were from the Foucaultian tradition culture as a feature of the lifestyle, ritu- of Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and als and world view of Maoris as anthro- Walkerdine (1984); others drew on thinking pologists would; nor did they treat it as a from Barthes, Derrida and other continental mental stereotype organizing the information figures, as seen in the earlier work by Potter, processing of the Päkehä (White, European [19:23 6/9/2007 4953-Willig-Ch05.tex] Paper Size: a4 WILLIG/STAINTON-ROGERS: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology Page: 74 73–90 DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 75 New Zealanders) as social cognition psy- of procedures and criteria for the reliable chologists would. Instead, they identified two identification of something as a repertoire. interpretative repertoires through which cul- Yet, many current studies offer only the ture was flexibly and locally constructed to vaguest idea of how the repertoires are iden- perform different activities. On the one hand, tified and how they relate to a corpus of data the Culture-as-Heritage repertoire was used (Potter, 2003a). There are important points to build culture as an antiquated inheritance of principle here, illustrated in the influen- that should be treasured but requires protec- tial exchange between Schegloff (1997) and tion from the rigours of the ‘modern world’. Wetherell (1998). On the other, the Culture-as-Therapy reper- The second area of difference between toire constructed culture as a psychological Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) conception of requirement that would stop Maori becoming discourse analysis and the later discursive rootless and mentally unstable. It is not that psychology concerns the place of open ended there is one notion of culture that these reper- interviews in the generation of analytic mate- toires express differently; it is that culture is rials. Potter and Wetherell draw on some constituted in importantly different ways by work using naturalistic materials, but much of these repertoires. Wetherell and Potter (1992) their discussion, and the majority of the very note that these repertoires show a sensitivity large body of subsequent studies using inter- to difference organized around social rela- pretative repertoires that this work spawned tions rather than genetics, and are thus free of have used open ended interviews. Discur- many of the connotations of racism. This is sive psychology is distinct from the earlier one of those reasons that they can be used tradition of discourse analysis in almost com- (in newspapers, parliamentary debates and pletely abandoning open ended interviews as everyday talk) to make powerful and hard to a research method. This was partly due to rebut attacks on Maori political movements profound problems with the production and and undercut the legitimacy of Maori claims. analysis of open ended interviews (Potter The notion of interpretative repertoires and Hepburn, 2005a). has been drawn on by many studies from Despite these major differences there are across the social sciences. It offered a picture some important continuities between Potter of complex, historically developed organiza- and Wetherell (1987) and discursive psychol- tions of ideas that could be identified through ogy. Both draw heavily on constructionist research, and