Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis

This book explores how you can research written or spoken discourse. It outlines in detail the very practical issues that you might face and the very practical solutions you can employ.  It is intended for a wide readership, including graduate and undergraduate students taking courses in qualitative research alongside practitioners.  It will be useful for anyone who wants to explore how to undertake or engage with discourse and conversation analysis.

It explores how you can study talk and conversations alongside studying how documents are created, used, and spoken for in various contexts as well as studying how documents or ‘texts’ seek to enrol us into a specific way of knowing, acting, being in and understanding the world.  It also covers such topics as how to generate your research archive - the diverse range of sources of ‘data’ that you can find yourself working with on a day to day basis.  This includes a detailed focus on the generation and transcription of audio and video recordings, where exactly the same section of a video is transcribed in different ways to show the different levels of detail that you can add to transcripts. 

In each chapter, the emphasis is on the practicalities of doing such work.  The discussion is grounded in examples of how people have actually generated, worked on and theorised with, different research materials.  The book does not seek to outline a set of specific criteria that ‘must’ be followed, but rather suggests a range of approaches, techniques and practices that help you begin to engage with and undertake discursive work.