Book Review: Qualitative Data Analysis Using a Dialogical Approach

Author:     Paul Sullivan  

Publisher: Sage Publications 

During this pandemic era, facing countless uncertainties, can we draw from resource installation of other dialogical approaches and theory? 

Perhaps when there is no lived experience to be had and only uncertainty beyond our own limit-horizons nothing is more practical than a good theory Lewin, K. (1951).   

A research title evokes myriad kinds of countertransference for a diverse readership.  As we seek to read, do we not bring in our own referential networks of understanding causal relation with effect; of practical usage and didactic learning needs and projections, all in accordance with our own reading zone of proximal development? 

Published some 9 years ago; reviewed and favoured by researchers treading the path beyond mainstream qualitative research methods, is Qualitative data analysis using a dialogical approach relevant to the non-research community too? 

I’m reminded of a time when I stumbled on the humble culture of diagonal reading.  Scoured and snatched paragraphs from display copies on standing shelves in bookshops, moments of text were diagonally read across pages.  Fresh first editions graced Parisian bookstores with uncut creased leaves of paper – a knife cut releasing folded leaf of page from page.  Back then a lived reciprocal role existed between the curious and broke student, thirsting in geeky corners of dusty bookstores with the browsing hope of grasping a key moment of nourishing text.   

Contrast to our otherwise normative and lofty hopes of assimilating a doctrinal text from systematic linear start to finish for a self to self pat on the back – such a contrast on the continuous spectrum from the dilettante key moment!  The hungry art of diagonal reading for the crumbs of a key idea or a touching moment bears relation to the fulcrum of the present moment ripening in therapy which is presented in this book review as the chunks of dialogic moments:  enactment magnets for data analysis.   CAT as a brief intensive short-term therapy pulls the key moments into focus from the background of the long story.   Then why should our relationship with dialogical reading not follow suite? 

If this introduction hasn’t obfuscated and lost the reader already, the grasp of transferential pickings of meaningful key moments abound with greater familiarity in The present moment of psychotherapy and everyday life, Stern, D. (2004).  Fragmentary moments become solid formulations as the central cornerstone for the arc of change in therapy’s dialogue.   

From this background Qualitative data analysis using a dialogical approach offered a gift grounding my own unformulated experience of diagonal reading and moments into a coherence through child development studies.  Daniel Stern’s work reveals hints of a dialogical method of grasping snatches and moments with a method consistent with CAT’s integrative framework.  Sullivan’s work here formalises a dialogic method.   

Beyond its published appearance as a method book for applied researchers into qualitative research, it offers the extending CAT reader the gift of deepening one’s own method of reaching into a reading of relational interactions towards growth and awareness of dialogical moments:  moments which are revelatory in the unmasking of the equipotential of human relatedness. 

Perhaps too understated, Sage Publications have filed this beautifully terse written diamond into the rough mine trove of research under social sciences and research methodology, eclipsing further interdisciplinary interest from the integrative schools of psychotherapy.    

It draws extensively on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin whose English translator, Michael Holquist, strives to render clarity for Bakhtin’s own dense multi-layered writing style (Bakhtin, M. 1981). The non-literary and non-philosophical reader familiar with Bakhtin will recognise his distinctive contextual opacity and challenging ground-breaking concepts.  In striking contrast, Sullivan writes with a translucent pen revealing Bakhtinian ideas through an integrative application of his own lived meditation on Bakhtinian thought.   He distils and translates some of the most challenging aspects of Bakhtin’s work as a method for researchers and within the proximal reaches of the wider community on the trail of Bakhtin. 

Towards a methodology for the study of the novel paved the introduction to the four seminal essays collected under The Dialogic Imagination [Bakhtin, M 1981).   As he did so does Sullivan in developing his own method and his own creative enterprise as a respectful interpreter of the Bakhtin adumbration from the more literary convolutions of the Bakhtinian landscape.  Bakhtin himself at times requires rescuing from his own scholarly referential networks and indeed, from himself (as does his reviewers – Ed.) in order to free a clear view of the salience of his thought within the Vygotskian reaches for a modern generation of readers, displaced and stripped of the time and context relevant for his writings.   

In this respect, Sullivan is bilingual, deeply versed in both Bakhtinian and Vygotskian scholarship, without which, Bakhtin might otherwise languish in clinical obscurity.   Sullivan’s interdisciplinary reading eschews the kind of headache for those curious and daunted by countertransference to Bakhtinian writing and non-linear intertextuality laced with textual analyses derived from the humanities.  The dry title Qualitative data analysis using a dialogical approach hides within an essential primer for understanding Bakhtinian humanity and dialogic ideas in practice.  Whereas Bakhtin’s seminal works like Creation of a Prosaics, Bahktin, M. (1990) articulates the terms and conditions of relational encounters as dialogue, in a language peculiar to Bakhtin’s own life and studies, from the mist of not-knowing he opens up the first formulations of specific concepts of polyphony; theory of genres; chronotope and the carnivalesque drawing from dialogical units (utterances of characters, authors and literature) of classical Greek texts.  Bakhtin as a Greek classics scholar contrasts to the clinician who is more familiar with a living subject in the present moment before him/her.    Sullivan resolves the dense woolliness around the Bakhtinian concepts, neatly carving them from their literary context as a foremost English language interpreter of Bakhtin studies in the psychological field of human encounter.  This act of polyphony: passing the living ideas of Bakhtin through the voice of another is indeed a Bakhtinian concept, borne out lovingly and collected within nine chapters, transcribed with fidelity towards Bakhtinian thinking in a contemporary re-reading and presentation of exploration of utterances and dialogic moments.  

Using dialogue to explore subjectivity he brings together the tasks of preparing, analysing, collecting and writing activities to hatch the dialogic validity in unearthed moments. Thus step by step, previously out-of-reach and novel Bakhtinian concepts, which were never going to be child’s play or be on an introductory CAT course, are freed into tangible sculpting by an artisan cherishing the weight of every word for the brave new reader.     The first two chapters can be read as a crash course in Bakhtinian concepts more as friends do, neatly framed within the readers’ zone of proximal learning through contemporary examples, application of analyses and recapitulated in helpful tables.   

The middle of the book undertakes the preparative journey into analysing moments of speech into categories and drawing on method using speech to access subjectivity.  Indeed the author’s preoccupation with the embodiment of subjectivity as the raw data cross-fertilises reverence in the reading of clients’ subjectivity, a contrast to the bracketing methods of phenomenological approaches.  Chapter six offers indispensable insights for anyone with an interest in unpacking dialogue in group therapy contexts. The latter three chapters focus on analysing, evaluating criteria for a dialogical method and discussing the data of collected key moments and the overall dialogical approach.  

In reflection, this CAT reader, touched by Sullivan’s work and hints of a future direction, asks himself whether the apocryphal essence attributed to Tony Ryle’s aphoristic attribution -name the dance, not the dancer, or push where it moves - can ever be voiced without Bakhtinian reverence, tacitly assumed and less often explicitly denoted, to the very person before us.   Without Bakhtinian reverence, naming any dance always risks dialogue collapsing into dialectical irreverence, whether chosen or carelessly unreflected. 

This is not a CAT book in any syllabus sense.  The extensive bibliography reveals its own straddle across the integrating interdisciplinary work of CAT; dialogic theory; hermeneutics and applied psychology which are orchestrated concisely in tune with the core of CAT thinking and holding onto CAT’s dialogic values at the very edge of interdisciplinary thought.  There are no grandiose claims for the readership to emerge fully fledged as a systematic academic method researcher of the dialogical method. 

Addressees within the sphere of academic research will value this uniquely creative qualitative method.  For diagonal readers and curious others lies an unexpected treasure trove with the Indiana Jones of Bakhtin’s magisterial vault, our enabling other, to see us through the dialogical Gulag of packing it in and giving up.  

Lovingly written and carrying the voice of his own mentor, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sullivan respectfully invites us to grow awareness of key dialogical moments through the clarity of his careful method.   

Publisher:    SAGE Publications 

Year:         2012 

ISBN:        9781446292273 

References:  

Bakhtin, M M  (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays edited by Holquist M, translated by Emerson C & Holquist M University of Texas Press  

Bakhtin, M M (1990)  Creation of a Prosaics edited by Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson Stanford University Press 

Lewin, K (1951) Field Theory of Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers (Edited by Dorwin Cartwright.) p 346 New York, Harper & Brothers, 1951 

Pollard, R (2008) Dialogue and Desire: Mikhail Bakhtin and the linguistic turn in psychotherapy  Routledge        

Stern, D.N.(2004) The Present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology