Asking Questions of the Data: Operationalizing the Disruptive Aims of Poststructural Discourse Analysis

I wrote this paper to support qualitative researchers in accessibly engaging with poststructural discourse analysis. In it, I detail how I flexibly adapted this methodology to meet my study’s aims. I begin by outlining poststructural understandings of discourse and explaining why a researcher may choose a poststructural discourse analysis for a study’s theoretical and methodological framework. While published poststructural discourse analyses commonly draw upon Foucauldian concepts to guide analysis, in this paper I share a more expansive approach. I demonstrate how developing and asking questions of the data can be one way to analyze diverse texts for the presence of discourses, thereby helping to operationalize a project’s poststructural aims. Drawing upon my research in the field of palliative and end-of-life care, I illustrate how this approach can support qualitative researchers from diverse fields interested in bringing a critical, expansive – and disruptive – lens to their study.