Discursive Psychology Uncut

The terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ often present problems for researchers from a psychology background coming across them for the first time. This is because the terms do not have an easily understood everyday meaning in the way that ‘personality’ or ‘development’ do. This is both a strength and a weakness for critical psychologists, as we shall see. The terms also present problems because many ‘introductions to discourse analysis’ describe discourse from a linguistic or sociological point of view. We can then lose sight of the distinctive critical contribution of a discursive approach to this discipline. There are, in addition, strong disagreements amongst discourse analysts as to what it is they are actually studying and how they should study it. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.