how to analyze discourse strategies for expressing controversial opinions

[Jonathan Newton]

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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