Post by Bogdana Huma

I’ve mostly stayed away from LinkedIn lately, but today I had to come back to rave about two awesome papers that have recently come out. They’re part of a new special issue on #DiscursivePsychology edited by Cristian Tileagă, Elizabeth Stokoe & Sally Wiggins Young published in #QualitativePsychology. The first paper [link: https://lnkd.in/eqKugn5s], by Emma Tennent and Elle Henderson, reveals the subtle power dynamics that underpin participant recruitment in most social scientific research. An often neglected aspect of the research process, participant recruitment rests on unverified assumptions about how identity categories work. The paper convincingly argues that traditional recruitment strategies, whereby researchers predetermine which categories of participants are included in a study, do not ensure that the participants speak *as members* of those categories. As an alternative, to access the lived experience of particular categories of individuals, the authors propose studying naturally occurring interactions in which those identity categories are made relevant. The other paper [link: https://lnkd.in/eV5Htcnu], by Elizabeth Stokoe, Charles Antaki, Dr Leanne Chrisostomou, Elle Henderson, & Simon Stewart takes a novel perspective on the long-lasting tension between quantitative “hard” and qualitative “soft” data. The paper demonstrates that the former are first and foremost a product of social interactions that habitually don’t get scrutinised, nor reported as part of the research process. This casts doubt on the objectivity of numbers & facts and reveals their hidden “softness”. Meanwhile approaches like #ConversationAnalysis and #DiscursivePsychology, which work with recordings of apparently “messy” everyday conversations, can provide solid approaches for transparent and reliable research on human conduct. After reading these papers, I feel truly inspired and look forward to seeing them engender further reflection and reconsideration of the taken-for-granted ways in which we conduct social scientific research in psychology and beyond. I warmly recommend these two articles, as well as the rest of the contributions in this special issue, to everyone interested in #DP #EMCA or #QualitativeMethodologies.