ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the impact of Jonathan Potter's (2004) classic text 'Discourse analysis as a way of analysing naturally occurring talk'. The chapter outlines the main argument developed by Potter, which is that discursive psychologists should focus on data that exists independently of researchers for the purpose of analysis. Next, it considers how this argument has been developed in subsequent work in discursive psychology and conversation analysis. His argument represents an implicit criticism of the large body of discourse analytic work that has generated contrived data. Speer has demonstrated that contrived materials, including social science interviews and focus groups can be naturalised, or treated as natural, in ways that contribute to people understanding of interaction. Potter and Hepburn further highlight potential problems with researcher generated interviews that can limit their usefulness. Therefore both natural and contrived data can be used for analysis because analyses of both can yield useful findings.
