Dialogue in focus groups : exploring socially shared knowledge / Ivana Marková ... [and others].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Marková, Ivana.

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Series:

Linguistic insights

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sociolinguistics.

Dialogue analysis.

Communication in small groups.

Social interaction.

Physical Description:

243 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; Oakville, CT : Equinox, 2007.

Summary:

In contrast to a vast literature that provides information and guides about focus groups as a methodological tool, this book is an introduction to understanding focus groups as analytical means exploring socially shared knowledge, e.g. social representations of AIDS, biotechnology or democracy, beliefs and lay explanations of social phenomena. The main emphasis of the book is to examine how to analyse interaction and ideas expressed in focus groups. The book considers, first, different kinds of dynamic interdependencies among participants who hold the diverse and heterogeneous positions. Second, it explores circulations of ideas and contents in focus groups. More generally, the book is concerned with: language in real social interactions and sense-making, which are embedded in history and culture, the ways people draw upon and transform social knowledge when they talk and think together in dialogue, the ways people generate heterogeneous meanings in the group dynamics, communicative activities and genres represented by different kinds of focus groups. This original approach to understanding focus groups will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in social sciences, communication studies, psychology, and language sciences.

Contents:

1 Dialogism: interaction, social knowledge and dialogue 7

1.2 What kind of dialogism? 8

1.3 Interaction 9

1.4 Socially shared knowledge 14

1.5 Dialogue 24

2 Focus groups through the lens of dialogism 31

2.2 What are focus groups? 32

2.3 Focus groups: where is the group? 35

2.4 A step back to research into small group dynamics 38

2.5 Focus groups and dialogism 45

2.6 The use of analytical tools in the study of focus group: four main assumptions 48

3 Dialogical analyses of focus groups: data and analytical approaches 51

3.2 Presentation of the focus-group data 52

3.3 Dialogical analytical assumptions at work: a first overview 55

4 Focus groups as communicative activity types 69

4.1 Introduction: communicative activity types 69

4.2 Framings and activity roles in communicative activity types 71

4.3 Focus groups as communicative activity types 74

4.4 Communicative activity type analysis of two kinds of focus group 79

4.5 Hybridities of framing 88

4.6 Focus groups as informal conversations 90

5 Who is speaking in focus groups? The dialogical display of heterogeneity 103

5.2 Positioning in dialogical dynamics 105

5.3 The heterogeneity of the speaker 108

5.4 From where is one speaking? 110

5.5 The play of identification through wording: coding and slippages 115

5.6 Relations between discourses 119

5.7 Other voices 122

5.8 Self-dialogism 126

6 Dialogue and the circulation of ideas 131

6.2 The dialogue of ideas 132

6.3 Topic analysis: from the flow of discourse to topics and themes 135

6.4 Trying out arguments and understandings: analogies and distinctions 139

6.5 Analogy-distinction cycles and topical trajectories 146

6.6 Arguments: stories in the service of arguing a point 151

6.7 Metaphors, metonymies, prototypical examples and other discursive figures 154

6.8 Quotes and hypothetical quotes 157

6.9 From themes to global patterns and underlying assumptions 159

7 Themata in dialogue: taking social knowledge as shared 167

7.2 From relational categories to concepts with 'more complex content' 168

7.3 Themata underlying social representations of AIDS 176

7.4 From trust/distrust (proto-thema, thema) to medical confidentiality (topic) 178

8 Focus groups as a dialogical method 195

8.2 What is a good method? 196

8.3 The method by proof and the method by invention 197

8.4 Towards a dialogical analysis of content 202

Appendix 1 Basic bibliography on tool kits and methodological guidelines 222

Appendix 2 Focus group data corpuses 224

Appendix 3 The 'moral dilemma' focus groups: excerpts in original language 227.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 208-221) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

ISBN:

1845530497

1845530500

9781845530495

9781845530501

OCLC:

80460392