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Chapter Three: Methodology, Research Design and Conduct
3.1 Introduction: Bricolage as Methodology
To form the combination of interdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical underpinnings
across a variety of complementary fields into a coherent research methodology a bricolage
approach has been adopted for this project. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), itself an
interdisciplinary approach, is privileged as the lead methodology. For this project, the
methodology incorporates visual analysis techniques; combined with an historical
methodological approach and framed by Gramsci’s (1957, 1971) and Althusser’s (1971,
1984) notions of hegemony, ideology and power. This enables within a rigorous approach, a
“…research eclecticism, allowing circumstances to shape the methods employed…”
(Kincheloe, 2004, p. 3). Bricolage methodology encompasses more than intended in the
literal French translation of the word—and a common starting place for descriptions of
bricolage—being a Jack (or Jill)-of-all-trades using the materials at hand in construction. A
bricoleur the name given to a researcher engaging in this type of research is defined by Lévi-
Strauss as a “Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself person” (1966, p. 17).
More than this, “(T)he bricoleur produces a bricolage, that is, a pieced-together, close-knit
set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a concrete situation…that changes and
takes new forms as different tools, methods, and techniques are added to the puzzle” (Denzin
and Lincoln, 1998, p. 3).
From a foundation of CDA as the lead methodology and combining other approaches to build
a rigorous, context-specific methodology this project develops CDA for specific time and
content contexts. Other researchers who use CDA (see, for example, Luke, 1997) also
develop it in divergent ways for the specific purposes for their research, ensuring a
strengthened approach. Van Dijk presents a view of CDA that can be interpreted as
supporting its incorporation into other methodologies, such as bricolage as occurs for this
project, by stating CDA:
…is not a method, nor a theory that simply can be applied to social problems. CDA
can be conducted in, and combined with any approach and subdiscipline in the
humanities and the social sciences.
Rather, CDA is a – critical – perspective on doing scholarship: it is, so to
speak, discourse analysis ‘with an attitude’. (2001a, p. 96)
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