Revised Social Text Analysis Aug 10 2012

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CHAPTER 15

Social Text Analysis

Baxter, L. & Babbie, E. (2004). The basics of communication research. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth (pp.347-379).

I. Introduction

A social text is a naturally occurring text rather than a researcher-generated text. Social text—symbols-in-use are everywhere in the conduct of private and public life. Virtually anything can function as a social text, so long as it involves symbols and meaning; naturally occurring conversation at home or at work, letters and diaries, photographs, films, magazine articles, public speeches, news conferences, memorials, art exhibits, webpages, and so forth.

Whereas a quantitative researcher is interested in enumerating the frequencies with which coded variables appear in a sample of social texts and their statistical relationships with other variables, the qualitative researcher is interested in understanding the meanings and uses of such social texts. The enterprise is an interpretive one, not a numerical one. Of course, a given text could be analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods, thereby lending multi-method strength to your analysis.

II. Research Using Social Texts

The qualitative analysis of social texts generally takes two forms in communication research. First, researchers analyze social texts as a form of triangulation with participant observation and qualitative interviewing. Second, researchers analyze selected social texts in their own right.

Qualitative scholars often use social texts as a way to complement their participant-observation and interviewing methods.

Communication researchers also analyze social texts in the absence of participant observation and interviewing methods. Social texts thus function as the primary data to be analyzed, not as complementary data to other qualitative methods. However, it would be misleading to imply that this approach is free of triangulation. When social texts are the primary from of data, they are corroborated with other social texts of relevance. Social texts contextualize one another, positioning the researcher to construct a mosaic of meaning from this “conversation between texts.”

III.The Process of Working with Social Texts

Malcolm Sillars and Bruce Gronbeck (2001, pp.23-27) make the useful distinction between “a work” and “a text.” “A work” is some communicative message – a speech, a TV

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program, a conversation. By contrast, “a text” is an interpretation of a work. A given work could contain multiple texts, or interpretations.

The first job of a qualitative researcher is to locate a work or sample of works – some public/private, mediated/nonmediated, scripted/ spontaneous, linguistic/nonlinguistic communicative message(s) Communicative works are usually selected because the researcher thinks that they are rich in information.

After sampling “works” the job of a qualitative researcher is to construct a text from that work – a process sillars and Gronbeck (2001, p.23) call textualization. Textualization recognizes the subjectivity of the researcher.

Sillars and Gronbeck (2001) have to say about the process of textualization: “the difficult-but-crucial point to understand about textualizations is that they are constructions made from the work yet, in an important sense, are grounded in that work” (p.26). In other words, the researcher creates a sense making of a communication act, message, or episode, but that sense making is constructed out of important features of that work. The researcher is obligated to stay grounded in the symbols-in-use – to remain faithful to the work – yet he or she engages in a subjective process of constructing an interpretation.

IV.Documents as Social Texts

To the analyst, documents are very important because they are the “paper trail” left by events and processes. Documents indicate, among other things, what an organization produces and how it certifies certain kinds of activities (e.g., a license or a deed), categorizes events or people (e.g., a membership list), codifies procedures or policies (e.g., rules for using equipment), instructs a readership (e.g., an operating manual), explains past or future actions (e.g., memoranda), and tracks its own activities (e.g., minutes of meetings).

Sometimes, documents (whether electronic, visual, or written) are of interest to researchers because they are explicitly used as resources by participants as they conduct their everyday lives.

Documents (of any kind) are also helpful in providing information that is not easily obtained through direct observation or interviewing alone.

In order to understand the organization’s culture, the researchers examined memos, brochures, organizational records and reports, newsletters, and books written about the organization’s founders.

A couple of cautions are in order when using documents. Sometimes, you can’t trust the accuracy of records – official or unofficial, primary or secondary.

Hodder’s observation means that researchers need to fully contextualize documents in order to gain insight into their meanings. A document’s origins and history need to be


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understood: Who wrote the document, when, under what circumstances, and for what purposes?

V. Enacted Talk as Social TextsVI.Approaches to The Analysis of Social Texts

There are many different approaches to the analysis of social texts. In this section, we will briefly describe five approaches that are frequently used by communication researchers: communication criticism, discourse and conversation analysis, the narrative approach, performative/dramatistic approaches, and the semiotic approach.

A. Communication Criticism

The family of approaches that studies public social texts (e.g., public speeches, television programs, films) is what Malcolm Sillars and Bruce Gronbeck (2001) refer to as communication criticism.

From our perspective, there isn’t a meaningful difference between qualitative approaches to communication and the more humanistically oriented approach found in communication criticism

The enterprise of communication criticism minimally involves three related aspects, according to Sillars and Gronbeck (2001): textualization, analysis, and interpretation.

We discussed textualization earlier in this chapter – the process of constructing a “text” from a “work.” Analysis involves the taking-apart process, breaking down a social text into its relevant units, dimensions, or themes. Using the vocabulary we first introduced in Chapter 4, analysis involves an identification of the relevant semantic relationships in the social text. Interpretation – the heart of social text analysis – is a putting-back-together process that culminates in an argument by the researcher about what the text means to him or to her.

In addition, Sillars and Gronbeck (2001, p.32) argue that some communication criticism adds a fourth feature – judgment.

For some, judgment is not an essential critical activity; criticism can end in interpretation. To others, judgment is the final activity that makes a critic a special observer and commentator on the world.

Judgment is not a simple subjective reaction to a social text (“I liked it,” “I thought it was morally corrupt,” and so on), but instead a reasoned argument in which an evaluation of some kind is rendered. Often, this judfment addresses the effect of the message and the communication competence of the speaker.

Sillars and Gronbeck (2001) identify three broad families of communication criticism: the rhetorical tradition, the social tradition, and the cultural tradition.


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1. The Western roots of rhetorical criticism extend back to Plato and Aristotle. Central to rhetorical criticism is a view of communication as a persuasive process. The analytical task of the neo-Aristotelian critic is to evaluate whether the most effective and appropriate means of persuasion were used in the selected text(s). Usually, this analysis involves analytic attention to several features identified in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The critic examines the development of the text’s persuasive elements. This involves, in turn, an analysis of the ethos (credibility appeals of the speaker), pathos (emotional appeals of the speaker), and logos (logical appeals of the speaker).

2. The social tradition replaces persuasion with a different assumption about communication. Instead of viewing communication as a message transmission designed to persuade, scholars from the social tradition view communication as a process of identification: “showing people what they share in common” (Sillars&Gronbeck, 2001, p. 139). From this perspective, analysis is organized around goals of understanding how rhetorical texts construct (or fail to construct) shared meaning between people.

3. The third tradition identified by Sillars and Gronbeck (2001) is the cultural tradition. Often aligned with the critical theory paradigm (chapter 3), scholars who employ this tradition view the homogeneous commonality of the social tradition as naïve at best and, at worst, domination of the powerless by the powerful. The social world is a world of fragmented voices, cultures, and groups, according to this third tradition. The goal of communication criticism is to liberate voices from cultural domination and to understand how cooperation is possible under conditions of cultural diversity.

Although Sillars and Gronbeck (2001) present these three traditions in the context of the analysis of public communication, we think that communication criticism (and its three traditions) holds relevance to the analysis of nonpublic communication as well – communication between lovers, co-workers, and Internet chatroom buddies.

B. Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis

Deborah Schiffrin (1994) summarizes two broad traditions of discourse analysis (DA Vs. CA), and thus two conceptions of “discourse.”

1. From a structural perspective, discourse refers to language above the sentence level. With respect to spoken language, this language-above-the-sentence unit might refer to utterances (which can contain multiple sentences) or perhaps entire conversations. With respect to written discourse, we might be interested in such discourse units as newspaper articles or Web pages.

1. 1. From a structural perspective, discourse analysis is the qualitative study of constituent units of discourse and how they are arranged in a system, structure, or grammar. For example, Richard Conville (1991) performed a structural discourse analysis of relationship partners’ accounts of their personal relationships. In a nutshell, structural analysis examines discourse for its underlying structure with respect to binary features. Just as we understand


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that the word “bat” is different from the word “pat” because of the presence/absence of a voiced plosive sound (the voiced plosive sound is “b” and the unvoiced plosive sound is “p”), we can similarly understand larger units of discourse based on the underlying structure of the binary features of which they are constituted. Conville identified a number of binary pairs that organized people’s accounts of their relationship, including such binary features as integration and disintegration.

1.2. A second approach to discourse analysis, identified by Schiffrin (1994), is the functional tradition. From this perspective, discourse refers to any kind of language use with the emphasis on “use.” Researchers from this tradition believe that discourse can be understood only by talking into account its purposes and functions in human life. Functional discourse analysts believe that discourse is interdependent with social life, “such that its analysis necessarily intersects with meanings, activities, and systems outside of itself” (Schiffrin, 1994, p.31). A functional approach, like a structural approach, seeks to understand patterns or regularities in discourse. However, unlike the structural approach, in which the analyst look inside the discourse to locate regularity in its underlying structures, the functional approach views discourse as a socially and culturally organized way of speaking in which certain functions are enacted.

1. 3. Let’s contrast these two approaches to discourse analysis by using the same example. Jenny Mandelbaum (1989) analyzed a short conversation among five friends in which a story was told about one of the friends, who had ordered a huge lobster for lunch. The storyteller was trying to make the friend the butt of a joke – a pig who eats a lot of messy food. From a structural perspective, Mandelbaum was interested in analyzing the internal structure of how a storytelling episode is enacted – for example, the parts of a story (including story initiation, the story’s punch line, and so forth). From a functional perspective, Mandelbaum was interested in analyzing how utterances, particularly those associated with listening to the story, functioned to help tell the story. In this particular instance, however, Mandelbaum found that listeners changed the story so that the original story line, in which the lobster eater was being set up as the butt of the story’s joke, was derailed in favor of an alternative story line – the lobster eater was portrayed as someone who can find good deals (a lot of food for a cheap price).

Within these two broad traditions of discourse analysis, many different variations can be identified. For example, Schiffrin (1994) identifies six different approaches to discourse analysis, and Teun van Dijk (1997a, 1997b) edited two volumes to introduce approximately 20 different approaches to discourse analysis.

2. Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to discourse analysis whose origin is in ethnomethodology. Ethno refers to a group, and methodology refers to the methods those people use to construct ways of doing things that are sensible and orderly. Ethnomethodologists are interested in how everyday people create a sense of reality – a sense of its “objectivity, factuality, and orderliness” (Lindlof, 1995, p.36). Ethnomethodology


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rejects a view that society exists “out there”; instead, ethnomethodologists are committed to the study of how members of a society produce a sense of social order or society through their everyday activities. Because conversation is a key way in which people construct a sense of social order in everyday life, conversation analysis became an important discourse analysis approach beginning in the 1960s with such scholars as Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson.

2.1. Conversation analysts study naturally occurring interaction, whether informal (e.g., conversations) or formal (e.g., pauses, oitch, loudness) and nonverbal cues (e.g., posture, hand-arm gestures). Schiffrin (1994) categorizes CA as a structural approach, drawing attention to the body of CA work that examines how conversations are structured or organized by the speakers. Although many CA workers seek to understand the underlying structures or regularities of conversation talk, this is not the primary focus of conversation analysis. The central purpose of CA work, according to Anita Pomerantz and B.J.Fehr (1997), is “the organization of the meaningful conduct of people in society, that is, how people in society produce their activities and make sense of the world around them” (p.65). Implicated in this goal is a functional perspective. Thus, we think that CA is an approach to discourse analysis that bridges both the structural and the functional approaches.

2.2. Unlike other discourse analysis approaches, in which social factors are recognized outside of talk (e.g., the gender of the speakers), CA gives no a priori status to any concepts or factors except as they are manifest in the interaction. A CA researcher would argue that, for example, gender may or may not be relevant to the speakers in a given interaction. If it holds relevance, the CA researcher will be able to point to how gender work is getting done in the careful study of the details of the talk. For example, Robert Hopper and Curtis LeBaron (1998), in an article titled “How Gender Creeps into Talk,” argue that gender becomes relevant in some conversations through the discursive work of the interactants. In part, this is accomplished by a verbal noticing – an utterance in which gender is somehow introduced into the conversations relevant.

2.3. Because CA transcription work attends to the microlevel details of interaction, it is generally the most labor-intensive kind of transcription. Some CA researchers estimate that it can take 30-60 minutes to transcribe every minute of uttered talk (Patterson, Neupauer, Burant, Koehn, & Reed, 1996; Wrobbel, 1998). Because ofthe labor-intensive nature of CA transcription work, CA researchers generally work with only a few conversations, perhaps even one.

2.4. Pomerantz and Fehr (1997,pp. 71-75) suggest five issues to consider in conducting a CA study. We summarize these as a way of giving you a feel for the kinds of issues of interest to CA researchers:

(1) Select a sequence of talk for study. In order to accomplish this, you will need to have a transcription of an audiotaped conversation. In order to study naturally occurring


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conversations, many CA researchers ask volunteers to simply tape-record conversations in their everyday life (following all of the guidelines for ethical conduct of research, of course!). After exam-ining the transcript locate something interesting that you think is going on in it – perhaps the way participants are “beating around the bush” and avoiding direct statements, or perhaps the telling of a story. This is your selected sequence. Sequences are jointly enacted by all of the speakers, so it is important not to examine just one utterance but the dance of utterances that is taking place between the speakers.

(2) Identify the actions in the sequence. An “action” is a core analytic term among CA researchers. It is what you think is being done in a given turn at talk. For example, if you were to join us for lunch and one of us said to you “It’s really drafty in this room,” the action here might be a simple expression of a perception, or it might be an indirect request for someone to close a window or door. An action is what is done with words—making a request, greeting, expressing a complaint, giving an order, telling a story, and so forth. For each turn at talk, identify its action(s). Then look at the preceding and following turns at talk. As Pomerantz and Fehr (1997, p.72) remind us, “Actions are not islands unto themselves.” Your identification of the actions in a sequence may change in the process of your analysis work. But you have to start somewhere with your analysis.

(3) Identify how the actions are performed. Here you are attending to the details of how a given action was accomplished. If the action you are examining is “disagreeing,” notice how disagreement is packaged: How is it that fellow speakers will understand it as an act of disagreement? Important to this analytic step is a consideration of other possible ways that the action might have been performed, thereby drawing your attention to the particular work being done by the performance as it was enacted. For example, there are many ways to enact “disagreement” – directly, indirectly, with humor, with affront, and so forth. What is interesting about how the action was accomplished in this sequence?

(4) Identify how the timing and taking of turns construct certain understandings of the action. As we noted above, actions do not take place in isolation of the chain of utterances in which they are embedded. In focusing on the turn taking between speakers, you are attempting to understand how the action of “disagreeing” was jointly constructed and understood as “disagreeing” by participants to the talk.

(5) Consider how the actions construct certain identities, and relationships for the speakers. As we commented above, CA researchers, unlike some other discourse analysis, do not “overlay” social factors on top of the talk; instead, they consider how the talk constructs social factors such as social class, gender, and friendship. Ask yourself how the actions function to implicate these social factors.

C. The Narrative Approach


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Narrative approaches are adopted in the analysis of social texts, in addition to the researcher-generated texts of interview transcripts. Basically, the researcher is examining naturally occurring instances of storytelling. Stories can be told in any number of communicative events – from public speeches, to stand-up comedic monologues, to family reunions. Art Bochner stated well the central assumption of this analytic framework: “Narrative – the stories people tell about their lives – is both a means of ‘knowing’ and a way of ‘telling’ about the social world and communicative experience” (1994, p.30).

According to Catherine Riessman (1993), a narrative is a form of discourse with a definite beginning, middle, and end in which a specific past event is recounted either chronologically or thematically. Narrative researchers who study social texts are interested in the process of telling a story, the form of a story, and a content of a story.1. With respect to the storytelling process, researchers might be interested in such issues as the context in which stories are told, how stories are introduced into naturally occurring conversation, and how tellers and listeners jointly participate in accomplishing a storytelling. For example, Jenny Mandelbaum’s (1989) study of the lobster-for-lunch story that we describe earlier illustrates this focus.2. With respect to story form, researchers might be interested in such issues as how the story is structured and narrative voice. For example, Marjorie Goodwin (1990) examined a particular story form called “he-said-she-said” enacted among a group of African American girls she studied.3. Researcher with an interest in content might be drawn to the story’s themes and meanings. For example, Baxter and Pittman (2001) examined the extent to which the important turning points in the development of romantic relationships were remembered through couple reminiscing events and storytelling to third parties.

D. Performative / Dramatistic Approaches

Scholars from the performative / dramatistic tradition perform texts as a way to understand them. They also analyze a variety of communicative performances enacted by others.

1. Scholars who adopt a performative approach to communication take a dramaturgical view, a view in which communication is conceived as a performance (Jarmon, 1996). In performing a text, the researcher’s voice and body are tools that assist the researcher in coming to understand what, and how, a given text means.

As Jarmon (1996, p. 352) tells the reader, performing analysts “provided continuously what might be thought of as embodied virtual recordings….Analysis used their bodies as synesthetic, multimedia playback instruments capable of producing details of sight, sound, and motion.” Put simply if a researcher can act like you – utter your words and mimic your mannerisms – he or she is better positioned to understand you.

2. Building on the theme of body as instrument, Robert DeChaine (2002) provides us with an alternative example of a performative approach. He posed the question of how we


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experience music as an embodied experience and then proceeded to conduct what is called an autoethnography – a participant-observation study of himself. His study is a detailed rendering of how a body (his) “performs” music in listening to it – his breathing rhythms and so forth.

3. Those who adopt a performative approach also analyze communicative performances of others. According to Richard Bauman (1977, p.4), the term performance has been used in a dual sense to refer both to the artistic action (the act or process of performing) and to the artistic event (the artistic situation, including the performer, the art form, the audience, and the setting). A communication act or event is performative if it somehow transforms the basic referential uses of language in which words are used to represent ideas, objects, and so forth.

4. Performance researchers thus analyze a variety of performance events, including theatrical performances and rock concerts. Matthew Spangler (2002), for example, examined how Irish identity is performed in Dublin’s annual Bloomsday festival, an event created to honor one of Ireland’s greatest literary figures, James Joyce. By participating in the festival, participants enact what it means to be Irish.

5. In addition to formal performance events, it is possible to see a performative dimension in a wide variety of other kinds of communicative actions and events. For example, when intimate partners adopt the mannerisms and words of celebrities or people known to them, they are engaging in performative role-playing. When a politician speaks to his or her constituency, we might find it helpful to view the event through a performative lens. When attending a basketball game, the fans are enacting the role of “fan.” And so forth.

6. Whenever a person has adopted a role or persona of any kind, it is possible to view the enactment as a performance intended for others’ consumption. Erving Goffman (1959) argues that we are always engaged in the social drama of self-presentation. We are always engaged in the business of impression management, putting forth a certain image of ourselves that we want others to legitimate. Put simply, life is a stage.

E. A Semiotic Approach

Peter Manning (1987, pp.25-26) defines semiotics as “primarily a mode of analysis that seeks to understand how signs perform or convey meaning in context…The work of semiotics is…to uncover the rules that govern the conventions of signification.” Semiotics, in short, is the science of signs.

1. Semiotics uses the model of language as the basis of understanding signification more generally. A semiotic analysis “pulls itself in two separate directions: one in the direction of the study of the rules themselves, or language, and the other, the relationships between the language and performance or the consequences of speech acts, pragmatics” (Manning, 1987, p.29). In other words, if you’re studying language, you can do it either by focusing on the rules of grammar or on the uses of language as it is enacted. When you studied a foreign language, you probably studied it in both linguistic and pragmatic ways.


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2. Peter Manning and Betsy Cullum-Swan (1994) offer some sense of the applicability of semiotics: “Although semiotics is based on language, language is but one of the many sign systems of varying degrees of unity, applicability, and complexity. Morse code, etiquette, mathematics, music, and even highway signs are examples of semiotic systems” (p.46).

There is no meaning inherent in any sign, however. Meanings reside in minds. So a particular sign means something to a particular person. However, the agreements we have about the meanings associated with particular signs make semiotics a social science.

3. While there is no doubt a story behind each of the linkages in Figure 15-3, the meanings that we “know” are socially constructed. Semiotic analysis involves a search for the meanings intentionally or unintentionally attached to signs.

FIGURE 15-3 Matching Signs and Their Meanings

4. Signs are any things that are assigned special meanings. They can include such things as logos, animals, people, and consumer products. Sometimes, the symbolism is a bit subtle. A classic analysis can be found in Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements (1979). Goffman focused on advertising pictures found in magazines and newspapers. The overt purpose of the ads, of course, was to sell specific products. But what else was communicated? What in particular did the ads say about men and women? Goffman suggested that the ads communicated that men were more important than women.

The latent message conveyed by the ads, then, was that the higher a person’s head appeared in the ad, the more important that person was. And in the great majority of ads containing men and women, the former were clearly portrayed as more important. The subliminal message in the ads, whether intended or not, was that men are more powerful and enjoy a higher status than do women.

F. Some Final Comments about Analytic Approaches1. The goal of this section was to touch on some frequently encountered analytic

frameworks in order to illustrate our basic methodological point. Analytic frameworks are intellectual scaffolding for the qualitative analysis of social texts, proving a lens through which to interpret what is going on in a text.

2. Analytic frameworks are guides. Not blinders. A good qualitative researcher always remains open to emergent questions during the process of analyzing a social text, no matter how radically he or she may step outside the boundaries of a given analytic framework.


SIGN MEANING

1. Poinsettia a. Good luck2. Horseshoe b. First prize3. Blue ribbon c. Christmas4. “Say cheese” d. Acting5. “Break a leg” e. Smile for a picture

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Analyzing social texts is like a conversation between the researcher and the text. If the researcher is blind to what is going on the text, his or her interpretation is a monologue, not a conversation. Similarly, if the researcher is a mere summarizer (rather than interpreter) of a text, we end up with a monologue of a different sort.

3. In practice, communication researchers often combine them. For example, you could use conversation analysis to study how stories are told. Or you could examine the performance of professional storytellers, combining performative / dramatistic approaches with narrative approaches. Many communication critics view public communication messages as narratives, thereby combining communication criticism with the narrative approach. The key here is to choose the analytic approaches, most appropriate to the social text that you want to understand.

VII. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF SOCIAL TEXT ANALYSIS

This chapter has emphasized social texts – naturally occurring symbols-in-use – in contrast to the researcher-generated texts of field notes and interview transcripts of the prior two chapters.

1. Social texts can provide a useful source of triangulation, particularly for participant-observation researchers. Part of spending time “in the field” involves being surrounded by symbols-in-use – the conversations people have, the magazines they read, the stories they tell, the posters on their walls, and so forth. Part of understanding the natives’ point of view involves close scrutiny of their social texts.

2. There’s a cautionary note about studying social texts, however: Meaning doesn’t sit in the text per se. If you want to know what a text means, it is important to have a full understanding of the context that surrounds the text, the uses that are made of the text, and what natives think is going on in the text. If all you do is scrutinize a social text in isolation, you can end up with a myopic – and empty – analysis.

3. The analysis of social texts is a labor-intensive undertaking, whether a public speech by a political figure, a TV talk show, or a conversation between friends. Although a researcher can “hire out” such tedious transcription work, it is often important for the researcher to do this work in order to gain a deep understanding of what is going on in the text.

4. The qualitative analysis of social texts lacks the precision that comes from the numerical analysis of coded textual units. However, meaning cannot be adequately captured in frequency distributions alone, which makes the holistic, interpretive task of the qualitative researcher a valuable addition to the researcher’s tool kit.
