ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some theoretical and methodological problems in the study of the relations between ethnic prejudice and its manifestation in discourse. The background to this discussion is a research program which deals with the reproduction of racism in discourse and communication, especially in the context of everyday conversation, news reports in the press and textbooks. Extending the traditional analysis in terms of attitudes to outgroups, the chapter analyze ethnic prejudice as a specific type of social cognition, as a negative social representation of ethnic minority groups shared by members of the dominant white group. Such an analysis does not merely specify the content and schematic organization of these social representations, but also their strategic application in ethnic situations. There are a number of ways in which the non-directive interview and its systematic (discourse) analysis differ from most other forms of experimental testing or field methods of opinion elicitation.
