CHAPTER FOUR
4.4 DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS
4.3.3 Aims of the study and research questions
The aim of the study is to provide a detailed description of how the interactional tasks of VCT are achieved, and how these tasks are achieved against the backdrop of theoretical frameworks that shape counselling practice. More specifically, I wanted to explore:
1. How the interactional tasks of information, advice and support are constructed by participants.
2. How the information, advice and support goals of VCT are discursively accomplished.
3. How these discursive accomplishments and constructions impact the unfolding interaction.
Silverman (2000) acknowledge that all researchers approach fieldwork with some orienting ideas, foci and some conceptual orientation that lead them to ask the particular research questions that they ask, and approach research in the way that they do. Institutional interactions, such as AIDS counseling, normally involve the participants in specific goal orientations or tasks, which participants work at together to bring to completion (Heritage, 2004). HIV/AIDS counselling is characterised by three core tasks – information, advice and support. Using this as a starting point, I read through the transcripts, looking at how clients and counsellors constructed information, advice, and support talk of VCT. Ritchie, Spencer, O’Connor, Ritchie and Lewis (2003) see this as a necessary step in becoming thoroughly familiar with the dataset in building the foundation of the analytic structure.
In reading through the texts, the three interactional tasks of counselling were not always evident in such a clear-cut way. Often, in practice, counsellors could be doing all three of these, or at least two of these at the same time. While the three tasks did overlap, there were clear instances of the participants doing information, advice and support talk. These appeared to be marked by distinct communication formats and discursive features. At this early stage, following Willig (2001), I tried to read for the discursive effects of the text (for example, I asked myself how the information, advice and support segments come across as text, or I asked myself what the texts were doing or how they read).
4.4.1.2 Coding
Reading and re-reading was followed by coding sections of the text for information, support and advice. I started with one case and read each transcript with a view to
looking for evidence of information talk, advice talk and support talk. Information talk was evident when the counsellor explained something, educated or provided information to the client. Information could be about the medical aspects of the disease, treatment, or sexual risk and prevention. Advice talk was identified as moments when the counsellor gave advice, made a suggestion, or offered a solution or possible action to a client problem. These advice segments usually contained language that indicated that advice was being given: (“should”, “why don’t you”, “consider”, “try”,
“suggest”, “advise”, “you could” etc.). Like information talk, advice often centred on issues related to medical aspects of the disease, treatment, sexual risk and prevention.
Support talk was identified as moments where the counsellor dealt with the client’s psychosocial issues, including emotional problems and concerns as presented in their talk.
The coding stage involved collecting as many instance of information, advice and support talk as possible. The goal was to produce a body of instances that were as exclusive as possible, rather than setting limits on the data corpus. Large sequences of text were coded in order to capture the local context as fully as possible. To retain the integrity of the session overall, and not to break up the data too much at this stage, this level of coding was done per individual transcript.
The next step involved sorting or ordering the data into larger sections of information, advice and support talk across the transcripts. This initial clustering of material allowed for an “intense review of content” (Patton, 2002) that was important for the next stage of analysis.
4.4.2 Step 2: Developing descriptive accounts and interpretation of the data
4.4.2.1 Choosing exemplars
At this stage, I worked with the information, advice and support data separately. After the intensive review of the content under each of the interactional tasks, it became apparent that counsellors used several discursive strategies to construct information, support, and advice talk. At this stage I was able to extract exemplars that demonstrated these strategies. Exemplars often illustrated the features of particular information, support or advice strategies evident in the talk of clients and counsellors. Gale (1991) suggests that exemplars are methods used to describe scholarly claims – these are detailed examples that demonstrate the validity of a phenomenon.
4.4.2.2 Moving into description and interpretation
I started to identify exemplars and developed a descriptive account of each of the discursive strategies that was evident in the talk. I drew extensively from Willig (2001) and Potter and Wetherell (1994), as I moved into this description and analysis phase.
4.4.2.3 Reading for the action orientation of texts
Drawing on these writers, and the constructionism and discursive leanings of this research, as I worked through the exemplars I was interested in the action orientation of talk. Willig (2001) defines analysis of text using an action orientation as involving a focus on “the way in which things are said as well as on what is said” (p. 93). I used this action orientation approach to describe and analyse each the strategies that was being used by the counsellor to give support, share information and to give advice. In doing this descriptive and analytical task I asked myself several questions:
1. How would I describe the core elements of the strategy? What are the particular discursive features of it? What is the evidence of such a strategy being employed? What makes it possible to be heard as such by the client? How does the client orient to the particular strategy?
2. How is the subject (person, object, thing or topic being dealt with or discussed) being constructed in the talk? How are objects (person, thing or object seen as the focus for feelings action and thought) being constructed? Overall, what effect do these constructions have on the interaction?
3. What is gained from constructing the subject/object in this way in the text?
What functions does it serve? (What does this particular construction allow the person to do?)
4. How is the strategy discursively accomplished i.e. what are the interactional rules on display, what discursive resources, methods and practices do participants use? Who does what, who takes and retains the initiative, who decides what the next topic will be, who participates, and to what effect?
5. What is the impact of these discursive moves on the unfolding interaction?
4.4.2.4 Reading the detail
In conducting a discursive analysis of a text, the task is not to look beyond the apparent messiness of interaction to discover general patterns or any laws beyond it; rather the analysis is focused on the specific detail of interaction and how that detail is precisely related to the activities that are being performed (Potter, 1998).
In working through the exemplars, drawing on conversation analytic tools, I paid particular attention to the fine details of the text. I paid close attention to the
conversation organisation of the text such as turn-taking, adjacency pairs as well as the detail in the discourse – the pauses, the repairs, word choice, variability in and between different texts; details of hesitations, repair and so on.
4.4.3 Step 3: Developing an account of voluntary counselling and testing interaction
The descriptive and analytical notes that emerged from the clients’ and counsellors’ talk in steps 1 and 2 were the start of the narrative that appears in Chapters Five and Six. I read and reviewed other CA and EM studies on counselling communication and interactions to help deepen my descriptive account and analysis. In writing up this account, I stayed grounded to the data. Holstein and Gubrium (2004) suggest that it is not so much the “case of letting the data speak but of empirically documenting the meaning-making process through ample illustration and reference to talk – the complex discursive activities through which respondents’ meaning is produced” (p. 155).