Fact is, I'm wondering that for myself, too.
Because I would love to have my colleague in the course with me, I tried to convince her to take it. In my email reply I said, "My hunch is discourse analysis could be an overall method of study or could just inform your method of data collection, transcription, and/or analysis along the way. I definitely recommend you keep taking methods courses, or what you learned in intro to qual will slip away."
That's all I could think to say because I really don't know much about discourse analysis as a qualitative research tradition.
I wish I could say, "I'm taking Discourse Analysis because my committee thinks it would be a good idea." Or, "It matches my dissertation proposal." Or, "It fits my research question." I would first need a committee, a dissertation topic, and a research question for any of that to be true!
On the plus side, I am an undergraduate English major and journalism minor and a former high school English teacher who loves to, well, talk! (I've been told by well-meaning friends who like me that I could carry on conversation with a tree stump.) I don't require much arm-wrenching to take a course that focuses on language use.
So, it's established I am interested in language and qualitative research methods. Is that reason enough to take a semester of Discourse Analysis? The reading selections for the first week leave me with more questions than answers.
Silverman claims the preparation and study of transcribed conversation is an absolutely worthwhile endeavor, but "without a way of defining a research problem, even detailed transcription can be merely an empty critique. Thus we need to ask: what sort of features are we searching for in our transcripts and what approach lies behind this search?" (p. 166)
To prepare transcripts with the attention to detail required by discourse analysis, it seems you would have to have a clear sense of purpose. A well-defined research question. I have neither of these. What I do have is an idea for a pilot study about what would happen if literacy teachers in the UT Reading Education program were allowed to choose and adapt digital and multimedia storytelling tools for purposes of representing case study data. The current manner in which case studies are reported and shared is fraught with technical difficulties, so I proposed an intervention in the form of a design experiment.
In my first pass at a proposal for this research project I made no mention of language-in-use or its role in the "creation and maintenance of social norms, the construction of personal and group identities, and the negotiation of social and political interaction" (Starks & Trinidad, 2007, p. 1374). Is possible or even appropriate to retrofit my research idea with a discourse analysis bent? Could I take a segment of recorded audio from my desired participant population and "get started" with "repeated, careful listening" (Silverman, p. 163)?
I am also wondering about intended audiences for discourse analysis and the level of "analytic abstraction" (Starks & Trinidad, 1377) required in the final write-up of these studies. I want to collaborate with real teacher/learners, using 21st century digital tools to solve a real problem in practice and produce research that reaches a practitioner-based audience, not policy makers.
Silverman claims the preparation and study of transcribed conversation is an absolutely worthwhile endeavor, but "without a way of defining a research problem, even detailed transcription can be merely an empty critique. Thus we need to ask: what sort of features are we searching for in our transcripts and what approach lies behind this search?" (p. 166)
To prepare transcripts with the attention to detail required by discourse analysis, it seems you would have to have a clear sense of purpose. A well-defined research question. I have neither of these. What I do have is an idea for a pilot study about what would happen if literacy teachers in the UT Reading Education program were allowed to choose and adapt digital and multimedia storytelling tools for purposes of representing case study data. The current manner in which case studies are reported and shared is fraught with technical difficulties, so I proposed an intervention in the form of a design experiment.
In my first pass at a proposal for this research project I made no mention of language-in-use or its role in the "creation and maintenance of social norms, the construction of personal and group identities, and the negotiation of social and political interaction" (Starks & Trinidad, 2007, p. 1374). Is possible or even appropriate to retrofit my research idea with a discourse analysis bent? Could I take a segment of recorded audio from my desired participant population and "get started" with "repeated, careful listening" (Silverman, p. 163)?
I am also wondering about intended audiences for discourse analysis and the level of "analytic abstraction" (Starks & Trinidad, 1377) required in the final write-up of these studies. I want to collaborate with real teacher/learners, using 21st century digital tools to solve a real problem in practice and produce research that reaches a practitioner-based audience, not policy makers.
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