Qualitative_data_analysis

34 QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
to my wife at 11 a.m., she may infer that I am asking her to make, or that I am
offering to make, or that I have just made her, a cup of coffee. The meaning of my
question may be clear from the context in which it is asked—whether I am emptyhanded,
headed for the kitchen, or have a cup of coffee to hand.
Mostly we take context as given. Communication errors can occur when a
‘wrong’ context is assumed, sometimes with humorous results. Take the exhortation:
‘leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time’—which
appeared on a sign in a laundry in Rome. Without knowledge of the context, we
might mistakenly infer that we are being exhorted to strip off and ‘have a good
time’. However, knowing the context obliges us to infer a rather more pedestrian
meaning!
Although it is convenient to write about taking account of ‘the’ context of
communication, this may be misleading. There is not just one context, but many.
Take that cup of coffee, for example. In the cultural context of tea and coffee
breaks, my offer fits a normal and taken for granted pattern of behaviour. Imagine I
had offered a whisky instead! Or take the social context. My wife’s inference only
makes sense if we are at home. If we were out shopping, she would take my
statement as an offer to buy a coffee, not to make it. And is the coffee to be a gift, or
subject to some sort of economic exchange?
The meaning of a communication often depends, therefore, on knowing the
relevant context(s) in which it is made. Note that we communicate through action
as well as words. If I take the coffee to my wife and leave it with her, and take mine
into my study, I communicate a quite different meaning than if I put both coffees
on the coffee table and sit down on the sofa obviously expecting a chat. Despite the
old aphorism that ‘actions speak louder than words’, social scientists sometimes
write as though the world were inhabited by creatures who only speak or write.
They don’t smile, scowl, spit, slam doors or communicate meaning in the many
other ways which we experience in our daily lives. Communication through action
is no less interesting, effective or bizarre than communication through language.
(Anyone who has watched how soccer players communicate with each other after
one of their team mates has scored a goal will know what I mean.)
Since meaning can vary with context, communication can convey more than one
meaning. Take the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, for example. In a literary
context, this can be understood as a straightforward children’s tale of Jack’s
adventures with the giant at the top of the beanstalk. In a psychoanalytic context, the
story can acquire a deeper meaning, in which Jack’s adventures convey some key
stages or tasks in the development of the child’s psyche (Bettelheim 1991:183–193).
Thus the exchange of the cow for magic beans symbolizes the end of oral
dependency and expulsion from an infantile paradise; and the phallic beanstalk
symbolizes social and sexual development, which when used to resolve oedipal