Data Analysis: Constructing A Socio-Cognitive Typology

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4.3 Data Analysis: Constructing A Socio-Cognitive Typology

If qualitative research is to yield meaningful and useful results, it is imperative that the material under scrutiny is analysed in a methodical manner Attride-Stirling, 2001, p. 187. The data collection methods discussed earlier in this chapter relate to the first step of my bothand framework which was to collect data on Western young peopl e’s socio-cultural and political-economic views, preferences, practices, and some of the major institutional settings that they are exposed to. However, this is only one half of the operationalization, the second half involves an analysis of the data that incorporates the study of macro power structures and ideologically charged discourses, the micro processes and contexts of everyday life, cultural and textual analysis, political-philosophical critical analysis, and socio-cognition inspired depth-investigations into discourses, audiences, and effects. In this section, I will present a step-by-step overview of this analysis and how it led to the construction of what I will refer to as a socio-cognitive typology. The content of this typology is discussed in the following empirical chapters.

4.3.1 Initial Thematic Analytical Groupings

Once the data was collected and transcribed, and after attempting several complicated schemes to organize the responses from my participants, I found that the most effective way to begin my analysis was to methodically organize the data based on how my respondents had answered the questions relating to the themes of my interview schedule, e.g., views on education, opinions on socio-economic issues and politics, personal aspirations see Table 4.3 below. I then compared these answers to the ideal neoliberal habitus described in Figure 4.3 in section 4.1.4. Fo r example, I would look at participant X’s answer to the question that asks about opinions on capitalism, consumption, and personal aspirations, and then carefully examine if X’s answers demonstrate an uncritical acceptance of capitalism. I also examined i f X’s answers demonstrated an instrumentalist view of education, materialistic aspirations, or negative opinions on welfare or welfare recipients. Furthermore, if participant X did express materialistic aspirations, then in order to draw a possible link between those aspirations and possible media- culture influence, I conducted a content analysis of most of their preferred media- 131 cultural artefacts that they divulged to me. From this content analysis, I could then analyse the relationship between the media-cultural discourses that they actively engage with and their socio-cultural and political-economic views and practices. Likewise, I also examined if my participants’ responses and in some cases practices, demonstrated critical views on capitalism and corporate media-culture, or more humanist conceptions of education. I also applied a political-philosophical analysis to my participants’ answers to the questions on socio-economic issues and politics, whereby I examined what type of political systems their political knowledge, views, and practices most corresponded to. I conducted this thematic and ideal comparison for all of my participants’ answers to all of the questions that they answered. However, not all of them answered all or most of the questions in my interview schedule due to time constraints and other unexpected complications that are typical of the more uncontrolled settings where the research was conducted. Nonetheless, overall there was enough data to be able to group interviewee’s responses with the similar responses of others. Lastly, I grouped all of my respondents into three basic categories for the first level of analysis based on a strong, middle, and weak correspondence to neoliberalism, characterized by some of the specific and consistent ways in which their responses reflect, differ from, or contest neoliberal discourses and practices. Table 4.3: Representation of the Thematic Ideal Analysis Themes discussed Each theme contained a number of related open-ended questions. Ideal neoliberal habitus dispositions, thoughts and practices Sample of p articipants’ slightly paraphrased answers that strongly correspond to the neoliberal habitus Views on education Consumption practices Opinions on socio-economic issues and politics Media-culture interests and interpretations Instrumentalist view of education. Uncritical consumption of goods and services, regardless of their possible exploitative production andor negative environmental impacts. A person-blame outlook towards social problems and overall negativejudgmental attitudes towards welfare recipients A preference for media-culture artefacts that contain pro-market or apolitical discourses. I think that schools should teach me about business. When I’m buying clothes, I think about the price and how they’re going to fit me, I don’t think about anything else. I think that welfare should be cut because people take advantage of it, and are just lazy and don’t want to work. I really like Jay Z because he raps about how anyone can become rich if they just work hard enough. 132 Personal aspirations A preoccupation with the accumulation of capital. I want to run my own business and be rich.  This is a basic breakdown of how I analyzed and grouped each of my participants ’ answers. The answers shown in this figure represent a high neoliberal variant, with other the two groupings representing a lower and middle variant, which I will elaborate on in the next two chapters.

4.3.2 The Socio-Cognitive Interface

Our selves demonstrate continuity in their emergence in the practices of different settings and that occurs to the extent that patterns of participation in different settings elicit similar meanings and practices. Our selves are not simply embodied and revealed in narratives we carry with us our self-concepts but also in our attempts at sense making, in our actions and interactions in settings i.e. in the ways in which we interpret ourselves and contexts Edwards et al., 2002, p 53. For my second level of analysis, I drew inspiration from v an Dijk’s 2006 socio-cognitive approach to discourse analysis, which originally introduced me to the concept of schemata. v an Dijk’s 2002 analytic toolkit consists of a three- prong framework that treats discourses, firstly as phenomena that are manifested in, among other means, text and speech; secondly, discourses are examined for their ideological underpinnings and the vested interests that they serve. Thirdly, discourses are treated as context specific i.e., relevant aspects of situations and society, and subjective representations of the social world that are stored and processed via an individual’s schemata. As van Dijk 2006, p. 163 explains: If contexts ‘control’ discourse at all, this is only possible when we conceive of them as cognitive structures of some kind. And only in this way are we able to define the crucial criterion of ‘relevance’, that is, in terms of a selective focus on, and subjective interpretation of some social constraint as defined by the participants. This also explains why discourse may be influenced by alternative, fictitious or misguided definitions of the social situation, as long as the speaker or writer ‘sees’ it that way. Thus, it is not ‘objective’ gender, class, ethnicity or power that control the production or comprehension of text and talk, but whether and how participants interpret, represent and make use of such 133 ‘external’ constraints, and especially how they do so in situated interaction. van Dijk 2006 uses this basic framework in conjunction with more traditional linguistic methods that incorporate the study of semantics, syntax, metaphors, and other linguistic criteria. While I do incorporate some of these linguistic criteria by analyzin g my participant’s semantic and lexical associations e.g., the frequency, connections, order, and connotations of some of the specific words that they use, as well as their categorical and procedural functions, what I mostly borrow from van Dijk 2006 is the socio-cognitive ontological position. This position presupposes that discourse processing and storage occurs in the generative cognitive structures of individuals, and that discourse processing, despite being a mostly unconscious phenomenon can to some extent be inferred and extrapolated from transcribed interview data. That is, in the context of this study, the discursive ways that young people express their views and attitudes, provide a window into their habituses, i.e., the underlying schematic content and organization of the societal discourses and practices that they have been exposed to, which guide their socio-cultural and political-economic views and practices in both conscious and unconscious ways. Additionally, v an Dijk’s 1998 socio-cognitive approach urges researchers to describe the structures of socially shared mental representations, as well as the processes or strategies of their social acquisition, use and change, With this in mind, and after reviewing the initial thematicideal analytic groupings described above, it became more apparent that, in addition to the explicit views, attitudes, and modes of cultural consumption, what certain young people share and differ in, is in the ways that they understand and process socio-environmental stimuliinformation e.g., social experiences, interactions, discourses, images, sounds. For instance, while all of my LA and London youth participants expressed critical stances towards certain neoliberal discourses and practices, certain participants expressed a more substantial understanding and knowledge of political-economic issues and theories, and were able to explain their political- economic views and practices in more detail and critical depth than my other youth participants, and connect them to their socio-cultural preferences and practices. Furthermore, they were able to do it very quickly in a seemingly 134 automatic fashion. According to some of the methods used by cognitive and social-psychologists e.g., priming, think out loud tests, the quicker a participant responds to a controlled stimuli in this instance semi-structured questions, the more likely it is that their reactions, or certain aspects of their reactions, are beyond their conscious awareness Fishbach Shah, 2006. While my study was not designed to incorporate such methods, the quick response times from those young people to certain questions suggest that they have highly informed and instantly available political-economic schemata from which to draw. More importantly, these highly informed political-economic schemata seem to correlate to the ways that they engage with dominant socio-cultural discourses and practices, which are markedly different from the other groups of young people. Additionally, I also observed that with all my youth participants, the stronger the valence i.e., negative or positive emotive tone or evaluation of an object, situation, or subject which influences judgments and choices of their dispositions or expressed thoughts, the more detailed their reflective accounts tended to be. This valence strength could be approximately gauged from their voice intonations as captured on my digital recorder and facial expressions which I paid special attention to during the interviews and wrote down in my notes. Hence, while the explicit and expressed, and in some cases displayed, socio-cultural and political-economic emotions, thoughts, and practices of my youth participants are valuable in helping to establish lines of delineation between groups of them, their dispositional tendencies, as can be inferred from their discursive, facial, and emotive responses, can help to add an extra level of socio-cognitive categorization. Therefore, and given that I did not feel that I had spent sufficient time with these young people and in their specific habitats to be able to provide a comprehensive account of their daily social practices, detailing some of their implicit and explicit socio- cultural and political-economic emotions, thoughts, and practices, as can be derived from their responses and body language, is the next best thing in gauging an approximation of their habituses ’ key cognitive, normative, and affective components, and serves as the foundation for further and even more in depth research. Lastly, I used an operationalized schema mapping framework to explicitly illustrate some of the lexical and semantic associations of some of my parti cipants’ socio-cultural andor political-economic schemata and their affective 135 and normative elements. I will elaborate on this in the following chapter in section 5.2 in order to better contextualize this operationalization.

4.3.3 Towards a Socio-Cognitive Typology of LA and London Youth

After I had examined the response times, voice intonations, facial expressions, and overall socio-cultural and political-economic semantic and lexical associations and their underlying affective and normative components of my participants’ responses, and having established the initial groupings discussed above, I roughly followed stages 3 and 4 of Kluge’s 2000 guidelines for creating a typology see Figure 4.4 below, and constructed three actual ‘types’ of young people: CriticalPolitical , ArtsyIndie , and Mainstream . In other words, these types represent real and observed characteristics and dispositions rather than ideal ones. In the following data analysis chapters, I will fully elaborate on the characterizations and points of delineation for each of the three types. However, before I continue, I want to emphasize that I constructed this typology as an heuristic. It is not meant to be a neat representation nor to pigeonhole my participants into any type; particularly as they displayed a variety of messy and scattershot views sometimes making their placing into a particular type difficult. In fact, three of my participants ’ accounts Zoo participants Emir and Becky, and World-Vision participant Desmon were not included in any grouping. 38 Rather, this actualreal yet proto typology is meant to elucidate some of the most salient and specific ways in which certain young people with shared information- processing and other characteristics engage with the dominant institutional discourses and practices of their society, how they are potentially influenced by them, and what strategies they employ to reject or resist them, e.g., via the internalization of opposing or counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. 38 In the case of Desmon, I simply did not have enough data to warrant placing him in any group. Emir was a recent Turkish immigrant, and while his socio-cultural practices very much resembled those practiced by Mainstream youth, his political-economic knowledge concerning US issues, was by his own admission, underdeveloped due to him being primarily raised in Turkey. Becky’s account, was a uniquely complicated one in that it reflected a hybrid between Mainstream and ArtsyIndie characteristics. Nonetheless, these three cases presented excellent learning opportunities that forced me to carefully construct my existing three-fold typology, as well as to think carefully about future categorizations and methodological fixes. 136 Figure 4.4: Model of empirically grounded typology construction Typologies are often criticized for not specifying the causal mechanisms or processes operating within each type of organization or classification scheme Scott, 1981. I will attempt to sidestep this issue somewhat, and argue that while non-determined, the causal mechanisms underlying each of the three typologies that I have created are of socio-cognitive origin. That is, and however vague that may sound, I have positioned my young participants within a particular type because of the ways they interpret, frame, react to, and discursively express social information, arguing throughout that these interpretations, framings, reactions, and discursive expressions are the result of the intersubjective interplay between existing societal discourses and their own unique, subjective, and acquired socio- cognitive schemata van Dijk, 1998. The specific positioning of my participants into a particular type is listed in the following tables. 137 Table 4.5: LA Youth Types CriticalPolitical ArtsyIndie Mainstream Anthony 17 Zoo Joey 17 Zoo Ben 17 Zoo Arlene 17 World Vision Lisa 16 World Vision Senai 16 World Vision Elizabeth 17 World Vision Lupe 17 South-Central Luz 18 South-Central Jasmin 17 Bresee Jesse 17 Zoo Evyn 17 Zoo Phillip 18 Zoo Zack 17 Zoo Diana 16 Zoo Jocelyn 18 Zoo Gloria 18 South-Central Tiff 18 South-Central Veronica 18 Bresee Jose 18 Breese Ela 18 Zoo Dennis 18 Zoo John 17 Zoo Karina 17 Zoo Maurine 17 Zoo Maria 17 Zoo Fernanda 17 Bresee Table 4.6: London Youth Types CriticalPolitical ArtsyIndie Mainstream Aimee 17 Islington James 17 Islington Sam 16 Islington Tirian 17 Hackney Sean 17 Hackney Tyrone 19 Hackney Iris 17 Hackney Jenkins 18 Hackney Jack 17 Bermondensey Lindsey 17 Bermondensey Alice 17 Bermondensey Anthony 18 Bermondensey Dylanda 16 Bermondensey Josh 16 Bermondensey 138 Chapter Five CriticalPolitical Youth Challenging Neoliberalism Rudy: How do you guys think these [social and environmental] problems could be fixed? Joey: By the youth. Rudy: Explain. Joey: When you’re a teenager and they say like you think that way now but you dont have a job, you dont have a car, you dont have to deal with this. And its like yes, I dont owe mortgage money to a bank, I have nothing to give to bank, they dont have any hold on me, the government doesnt have any hold on me, Im not 18 yet. I dont have to pay car companies, I dont have to pay oil companies, I dont give anything to any of these things. I dont have responsibilities; I dont owe anything to anyone. Im completely free to think what I want to think, and I know what I see, and its like once youre an adult and youre sucked into the world that is, and Its really hard to change it, but when youre not yet considered part of it, and having to like, work in it. [ …] So its up to the youth. Zoo participant Rudy: So what kind of actions do you think then are necessary to make governments responsive for instance to the views or the wants of their citizens? Aimee: Threatening the mechanisms that they rely on, and the interests of the people who fund them. I think there is something that’s said quite often, if all the people who marched against the Iraq War had rioted against the Iraq War, we wouldn’t have gone to war. Islington participant Thus far I have reviewed and described some of the dominant socio-cultural and political-economic institutions, discourses, processes, and mechanisms that constitute contemporary US and UK neoliberal societies. While taking a non- deterministic position that emphasizes the active role of agents in accepting, rejecting, reformulating, or negotiating between the societal discourses presented to them, I have nonetheless argued that current US and UK young people are subject to a hegemonic media driven neoliberal culture that is hard to ignore. In order to begin to explore the complicated micro-level interactional dynamics between this neoliberal culture and individual agents, I now turn to an analysis of my LA and London interviews and observations using extracts from my data. In this chapter, I present a detailed characterization of one of the three actual “types” of LA and London young people that I will refer to as CriticalPolitical. 139 Throughout this chapter, I will attempt to demonstrate how these young people exhibit transposable socio-cognitive dispositions; viz., mentally stored and unconsciously manifested subjective societal attitudes, beliefs, preferences, affects, and inclinations, 39 that are predominantly politically and critically charged, and that orient them towards more reflective views and practices that are critical of, and which challenge, existing neoliberal discourses. By pointing to some of their socio-cultural experiences and agentic practices, and by unpacking the substantive content, i.e., central tendencies, and conceptual, semantic, and lexical associations of their underlying socio-cultural and political-economic schemata as can be extracted from their accounts, 40 I seek to highlight some of the ways that those critical and political dispositions are actively reified. Lastly, I will end this chapter with a section that describes how some of these young people’s schemata for political-economic organization and human nature, nonetheless mirror or correspond to existing neoliberal discourses, and the potential implications this may have for neoliberal reproduction.

5.1 CriticalPolitical Youth: A Leftist Disposition