Critically discuss the contribution of discursive psychology to understanding human reality.
Discursive psychology is primarily focused on looking at how people live their lives. Within this, discursive psychology looks at how people act in their everyday lives, and how psychology is constructed in this. It is a study of our mental representation, and how we make sense of our world (Potter, 2003). Discursive psychology focuses on how people create and manage talk, rather than what the cause of this is. It looks at categories and constructions that appear in an interaction in a particular context. Discursive psychology believes that discourse is constructed as well as constructive. Our discourse is constructed as it consists of linguistic building blocks (Fox, Prilleltensky & Austin, 2009). Another principle of discursive psychology is that discourse is action-orientated. Our discourse is the primary source we use in order to blame, or compliment someone for example whilst we speak. Discursive psychology also believes that discourse is situated. . It has been found that those suffering from an eating disorders may construct their eating behaviours in specific ways. (Vitousek, Watson, & Wilson, 1998). Thus the discursive psychology approach to eating behaviours and disorders is particularly interesting, and helps us to understand human reality. Due to this, I will be using the topic of eating behaviour in order to illustrate just how discursive psychology helps us to understand human reality. The following essay will critically discuss discursive psychology and will look at how it is helping us to understand human reality. It will begin by looking at the methods used, the use of naturalistic data in discursive psychology, and comparing this to the mainstream psychology methods. It will then present issues regarding goal orientations in our speech in relation to eating behaviours, and will contrast this to mainstream psychology. After, I will show how...