British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2004), 22, 509–513

2004 The British Psychological Society

Commentary

Words, words, words

Anne Campbell*Department of Psychology, University of Durham, UK

Stripped down to its essentials, Korobov and Bamberg (2004) present us with 72 lines

of conversation spoken by 10 adolescent boys in response to questions about growing

up posed by an adult male stranger. The products (but not the means) of analysis are

described. We learn that the boys used three rhetorical devices, and contradicted

themselves. The authors lay no claim to generality with respect to these findings.In evaluating the merits of their article it is impossible to escape wider questions

about the merits of discourse analysis (DA) itself. In both cases, there are internal

contradictions (so compelling to these analysts in the discourse of others) about

method, power relations, characterization of mind, development and insularity.

Method

The authors sought to examine maturity ‘as it is locally and discursively accomplished

by young men as part of their everyday interactive social practices’. Because DA views

beliefs, attitudes and values as discursive tools that are deployed in conversation, it is

clearly vital to attend to the context and composition of the conversational group. If

language is used to achieve social functions that vary depending on the conversational

audience, it is unlikely that answering questions posed by an adult male stranger could

reveal anything about these boys’ ‘everyday interactive social practices’. As most

parents know, the way in which teenage boys speak when an adult is present bearslittle relationship to the kinds of conversations they have when they believe they are

alone.

Nonetheless, the authors have identified three tactics which these boys use to

present their behaviour as mature to a male interrogator. They are more familiar to

mainstream psychologists as (1) Justifications and excuses (Austin, 1979; Scott &

Lyman, 1968), (2) Conditional statements and (3) Ingroup–outgroup differentiation

(Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell 1987). However, DA, by its very nature,

means that these findings cannot be generalized to these same boys in a different settingor to other boys in a similar setting – let alone to any other culture or historical period.

www.bps.org.uk

* Correspondence should be addressed to Prof Anne Campbell, Department of Psychology, University of Durham, South Road,Durham DH1 3LE, UK (e-mail: a.c.campbell@durham.ac.uk).

509

It is not just a question of collecting more data; the essence of the approach is that there

are no general rules that guide human behaviour. Since the same precise circumstances

and personalities will never recur, we can go no further than a contextualiseddescription of a piece of interpersonal history. What you read is what you get – nothing

more.

The term discourse analysis seems to imply an emphasis on how the data were

analysed. Despite the authors’ goal of ‘analytic rigour’ and their claim that the paper

‘reveals (rather than conceals) how the analysis was conducted’, I can find no such

revelation. What is the unit of analysis? Who decided that these textual selections were

relevant to maturity, rather than any other theme, and why? Were these same three

rhetorical devices used in relation to other themes or only this one? Three of the fiveexcerpts included group members called Don and Hal – on how many occasions were

these devices used when these boys were not present? No reliabilities are reported: are

we to assume that other coders (armed with appropriate definitions) would agree on

the frequency of occurrences of the devices identified in the paper? Inevitably we come

to the issue of validity. In relation to DA, I interpret validity to mean the extent to which

the functional interpretations about language use offered by the authors are correct.

Since these conversational devices are used to avoid (generally) ‘conversational trouble’

and (specifically) the appearance of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, one assessment of validitymight be to consider whether these devices also appear at other junctures in the

transcript that present such problems. Or the authors might take the step of confirming

with their participants that the interpretations of function they have identified are

correct. There is no evidence that this was done and this brings me to another problem

with DA – the politics of research.

Power relations

Mainstream social psychological research is a favourite target of attack by DA on the

grounds that researchers fail to treat their participants as fully competent social agents

but patronize them by using questionnaire items that are ‘relatively stereotypical and

arguably facile descriptions’. While there are indisputably good and bad questionnaire

items, they are at least transparent to the participant who responds to them. She or he is

free to express qualified agreement, disagreement or indeed to omit the item altogether.

She or he knows the topic that the researcher is addressing and that the items will beobjectively scored.

In DA, the point of the research is far from clear to the participant. In the present

study, the boys were asked to talk about ‘what it means, from their perspectives, to be

growing up as young men’. What the boys did not know was that their dialogue, far

from being treated as a window on their lived experience, would be analysed with

respect to sexuality and, specifically, the linguistic devices they used to avoid appearing

‘shallow, sexist, ignorant or desperate’ and ‘gay’. The focus is not on the substance of

the boys’ accounts but on their contradictions and inconsistencies that reveal how they‘work up identity claims that do not appear too obvious, challengeable or immature’.

Moreover, these judgments are made by the researcher without any consideration of

how the boys themselves intended their statements to be understood. The researcher

not only sees subtleties invisible to the ordinary adolescent, but fails to explain to fellow

researchers how such insights were derived. [Parenthetically, it is ironic that DA

disparages mainstream work for ‘speculating about the mental or attitudinal objects

510 Anne Campbell

that (questionnaire items) putatively reflect’, while they themselves speculate about the

discursive functions served by various linguistic devices. A deeper irony is that these

very mental objects, about which mainstream researchers ‘speculate’, are used by theboys themselves who appeal to ‘an inner realm of intentionality, dispositions or

motives’].

In DA, the boys and the readers must take the accuracy of the researchers’

speculations on faith. Defenders of DA may well respond that there is no final or

ultimate ‘reading’ of the text and freely acknowledge that their interpretation is no

more authoritative than anybody else’s. In that case, what is the value of this research

for psychology? Literary criticism is the study of how language is used to achieve an

effect on the imagination of the reader. It is axiomatic that there is a near infinitenumber of interpretations for any piece of text. But psychologists traditionally study

minds, not texts. A chemist can analyse the constituents of oil-paint but we would not

expect a chemist to analyse the artwork that such paint can be used to produce. No

more is literary criticism the proper domain of psychology.

Characterization of mind

What kind of social mind do Korobov and Bamberg envision? It is a mind that lacks

attitudes and beliefs; it does not resolve tasks or move through stages of development; it

does not internalize norms; it does not progressively acquire ‘internal dispositions,

gender schemas, or cognitive scripts’ or if it does, these are irrelevant to understanding

discourse. It is emphatically not individualistic; developmental change is an emergent

process existing in the ‘interactive space between participants’. Nonetheless, their

participants’ speech suggests an impressive ability to query, dispute, caricature and

justify the very qualities (values, norms, beliefs, stages) that it does not possess. Howcan a mind ‘manage masculine norms’ without having internalized them? In the same

way, the boys must know what ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is and that it causes

‘conversational trouble’, otherwise they would not know how to avoid it.

The mind envisaged by DA does apparently allow the participants to position

themselves. Positioning is not clearly defined but we are told that ‘subjects ‘agentively’

pick a position among those available’ and ‘discourses are taken to provide the

meanings and values within which subjects are positioned’. This sounds suspiciously as

if the participants do indeed have what others might call a point of view – an attitude,value or belief. Could picking a position be rather like selecting a point on a rating

scale? No, because attitudes are not ‘mentally held’ but rather are ‘partial and shifting

devices’. So, we have a mind that entertains every viewpoint but commits to none.

Attitudes, values and beliefs are temporary devices, picked up and discarded as the

problems of discursive positioning present themselves. This view of mental states as

mere word games is problematic for psychologists who seek to understand very real

adolescent problems such as drug addiction, violence, depression, anorexia and self-

harm.

Development

The paper clearly does not treat maturity as a subject matter (i.e. a topic that the boys’

tell the researcher about) but as a quality that the researchers attribute to the boys’ talk.

511Words, words, words

However, the proposed relationship between discourse and maturity is unclear. On the

one hand the authors suggest that through conversation boys acquire maturity: ‘Rather

than viewing maturation as the effect of resolving developmental tasks, we argue that’maturity’ comes to existence in the way talk is accomplished’. On the other hand, they

imply that being able to astutely manage conversation requires an already-achieved

maturity; ‘development (for these boys) involves the discursive rendering of linguistic,

interactional and rhetorical skills’.

Either way, the development of mature conversational skills is at issue. While the

authors criticize other researchers’ lack of attention to ‘developmental process’, they

fail to address it themselves. The paper reports limited cross-sectional data that makes

no pretence of describing any developmental trajectory. Many psychologists areinterested in the ages at which children understand norms, expectations, stereotypes

and others’ beliefs, and at what point they are able to challenge, justify and qualify their

own and others’ behaviour in relation to them. There is a considerable body of work in

moral development, theory of mind, gender schema theory and peer relations which

addresses these issues. None is discussed – which brings me to my final point.

Insularity

Korobov and Bamberg present the hypothesis that gender is a social construction as an

established fact. They reject traditional methods because they are ‘inimical to the

discursive dictum that gender is a socially and interactively constructed phenomenon’.

It is these traditional methods that have been used in the body of literature that they

ignore and that strongly contests the view that gender is socially constructed (Archer,

2004). These methods have shown that there is remarkable cross-cultural agreement on

characteristics that are associated with masculinity and femininity (Williams & Best,1990); that these characteristics have not altered appreciably over the last 50 years

despite women’s entry into the work force (Lueptow, Garovich, & Lueptow, 1995);

that division of labour varies little across societies (Wood & Eagly, 2002); that

behavioural sex differences emerge before children understand gender stereotypes

(Campbell, Shirley, & Candy, 2004); that knowledge of gender stereotypes bears no

relationship to sex-typical behaviour (Ruble & Martin, 1998); that within 36 hours of

birth girls show more interest in faces and less in mobiles than do boys (Connellan,

Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Ba’tki & Ahluwalia, 2000); that toy preferences character-istic of human boys and girls are found also in young vervet monkeys (Alexander &

Hines, 2002) and so on. These studies are not challenged or disputed, but instead are

ignored.

Lest it be thought that I have some aversion to qualitative methods in general, some

of the work that has most affected my own research interests has been qualitative (e.g.

Liebow, 1967) as has much of my own research (e.g. Campbell, 1984). In my own field

of female adolescence, a number of qualitative studies have shed important light on

techniques of indirect aggression (Owens, Shute, & Slee, 2000), the perils of popularity(Simmons, 2002), managing anger (Brown, 1998) and cross-sex relations (Duncan,

1999). These studies allow informed hypotheses to be generated and tested. They do so

by taking their informants’ statements seriously as genuine reports of their experience.

They treat the participants as true collaborators, even experts, reporting from a world

that the researcher can no longer enter. Discourse analysis, with its unbounded

contextual relativism, its refusal to grant any form of human nature, its treatment of

512 Anne Campbell

language as a game of words that have no external referents, its opaque lexicon, and its

view of analysis as an art form too subtle to be comprehended by its participants or to

be explained to academic peers, does little to enhance the credibility of psychology.

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513Words, words, words