10

Reflecting on Your Own Talk: The

Discursive Action Method at Work
Joyce Lamerichs and Hedwig te Molder

This chapter describes how we developed a Conversation Analysis-based

intervention approach, which we call the Discursive Action Method. The
method aims to make people critically aware of how they talk and, on that
basis, to help them shape their own practices. The method has its roots in
an early statement of what Edwards and Potter termed their ‘Discursive
Action Model’ (Edwards and Potter, 1993) and is based on insights from
Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology1 more generally (Edwards,
1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Hepburn and Wiggins, 2007; Hutchby and
Wooffitt, 1998; Potter, 1996; Potter and Te Molder, 2005).
We developed the Discursive Action Method (DAM, for brevity’s sake) as
a systematic method in response to the needs that emerged from trying to
educate young people about health and wellbeing. The framework was a
four-year participatory health education project called LIFE21,2 and our brief
was to encourage adolescents to work out school-based health interventions
geared towards their peers. What we developed over that period is, we think,
a robust and portable set of techniques, based fundamentally on a CA reading
of talk, that can be used in a variety of intervention programmes.
Before explaining the steps of the DAM in greater detail, it is important
to point out that the method can fulfil different functions. The method can
work with any intervention where there is engagement between trainers or
facilitators and the people whose practices are to be changed (as is reported
in other chapters in this volume; see for example, Kitzinger with call tak-
ers on a help line in Chapter 6, Stokoe’s work with mediators in Chapter 7,
or Finlay, Walton and Antaki’s with care staff in Chapter 9). Depending on
the key questions that are posed during the workshop by trained workshop
leaders, different goals can be achieved. As such, the method can stimulate
participants to improve their listening skills, raise their awareness of how

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011
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they talk and act, or encourage participants to develop their own activities.
In the context of the current project, the method aimed to accomplish the
second and the third goal in particular. While applied here in a health con-
text, we think the method consists of a set of generic steps that makes it a
useful approach to be employed in other settings, where it can be flexibly
adapted to the needs of the target group. We will discuss these matters of
applicability more fully in the discussion. In the remainder of this chapter
we set out to explain the method’s steps and how they were applied, how the
method was instrumental in raising adolescent’s critical awareness of how
they talk and act with their peers, as well as how it formed a basis for setting
up school-based health activities.

Background to the project: a conversational turn in

developing health activities

The participatory health education project that brought us into contact with
young people was conducted in cooperation with the municipal health serv-
ices in Eindhoven, a middle-sized city in the south of the Netherlands. The
municipal health services are well-connected to the target group on many
levels (see, for an overview, Lamerichs et al., 2006). LIFE21 was ultimately
conducted at three secondary schools for higher education in Eindhoven.
The project’s aim was to invite adolescents (14 to 17 years of age) to think
about the ways in which they talk about health in their everyday conversa-
tions, and to use those reflections as the basis for them to develop health
interventions aimed at their peers.
There have been several attempts to apply insights from interaction analysis
to the area of health communication. Initiatives that aim to improve commu-
nication in this area share a concern for: (1) working with naturally occurring
talk rather than data created for the purpose of research (e.g., setting up focus
groups with target group members) and (2) using taped material (often referred
to as ‘trigger tapes’, see Jones, 2007: 2299) or transcripts as the basis to engage in
a discussion about particular aspects of the unfolding talk (Koole and Padmos,
1999; Roberts, Davies and Jupp, 1992). The development of the DAM can be
placed within this tradition. One of the method’s most important assets is its
strong basis in the interactional details of the conversational materials. But
compared to other projects, our method is also innovative in two other ways.
First, the input for the method – conversational data from the target group – is
collected by members of the target group themselves; and second, after a pre-
liminary analysis of the data by the researchers involved in the project, mem-
bers of the target group are turned into analysts of their own data.