how to analyze discourse strategies for expressing controversial opinions

[Tania Shepherd]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jonathan Newton 
  To: DISCOURS at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG 
  Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 10:17 PM
  Subject: how to analyze discourse strategies for expressing controversial opinions


  Dear list members (apologies for cross-posting from LANGUSE list)

  A colleague from psychology has asked for advice on how to code 70+ pieces of open-ended qualitative data (written) concerning how one ethnic group feels about allocating scholarships to  another minority group.  The design involved four experimental conditions (Indept variables) in which participants were responding to four different justifications for the focused scholarships. Some of the responses are quite direct and aggressive in their expression while others use lots of hedging and strongly qualified statements of opinion.  What my colleague needs is advice on how to code and quantify these differences at a linguistic/discursive level. He is then interested in relating these identifiable discursive patterns to established scales in psychology such as modern racism, social dominance orientation, and authoritarian personality and to identify the different discursive repertoires that students are using to justify the allocation of resources to different people. 

  The issue is then, what DA frameworks exist that might assist this analysis? So far we've discussed analyzing hedging devices, modality, vocabulary (unfair, handouts, racist etc), positioning of self (I think, we..., show me... we are one nation...) but need to come up with a coding system that allows comparison of count data. 

  Suggestions gratefully received!!

  many thanks
  jonathan 
   ************************************************ 
   Jonathan Newton 
   Senior lecturer & Cert/DipTESOL Programme Director
   School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 
   Victoria University of Wellington 
   P.O. Box 600 Wellington, New Zealand 
   Tel + 64 4 463-5622,  Fax + 64 4 463-5604 
   http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/ 
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  See you at CLESOL 2002 (NZ Community Languages and ESOL Conference) 
  Wellington July 5-8 2002!!!!
  Check out the conference web site http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/div1/clesol/
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