Doctoral Dissertation Research: Media, Social Context and Public Discourse

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Pamela E. Oliver (PI), Peter K. Brinson (Co-PI)Institution: University of Wisconsin, MadisonTitle: Doctoral Dissertation Research: Media, Social Context, and Public Discourse0828479AbstractThis research project will examine the process by which different groups of people draw from their cognitive beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and moral values to develop specific opinions about same-sex marriage and civil unions. Data will be gathered through focus group interviews of people living in the American Midwest to analyze how people talk about, conceive, and understand same-sex marriage and unions. One goal is to examine how people mobilize cultural understandings as they construct opinions about contentious issues. This project uses the case of same-sex marriage and civil unions to examine both how people are constrained by the ?structure? of culture, and how people use culture ?pragmatically? in order to make sense of the debate. Focus group participants will be drawn from a variety of already-existing groups in civil society to ensure a diversity of perspectives between groups. The transcripts of the focus group discussion will be coded and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. One level of analysis will identify the discursive similarities and differences among group discussions, including the group dynamics, cultural attitudes and beliefs, frames, points of agreement and disagreement, and argumentative logics and resources. A second level of analysis will relate discursive similarities and differences to differences between groups. Special attention will be given to differences among the ideological and social context of interaction in each group, including discursive differences between the younger and older generations and those between the groups in civil society from which focus groups are drawn (e.g. recreational, religious). The results of this study will be publicized and disseminated broadly in order to shed light on politics of same-sex unions, and provide a greater depth of knowledge about where people?s attitudes about same-sex unions. This dissertation research will contribute both to the specific debate about legalizing same-sex relationships and to the more general understanding of the relationship between political discourse and democracy. More broadly, this research will be relevant to debates about the tenor of political discourse in the United States: whether political discourse today is too extreme or too tepid, whether ideological differences reflect irreconcilable ?culture wars,? or whether the political system artificially constrains the terms of political debate to the ideological ?middle.? Finally, this study will contribute to this debate by examining how people in different social contexts talk about one controversial issue in both similar and different ways?how culture both facilitates and constrains public discourse.