Conceptual Metaphors as Interpretive Tools in Qualitative Research: A Re-Examination of College Students’ Diversity Discussions

Abstract

In this contribution to the growing literature on conceptual metaphor as a fruitful heuristic for qualitative analysis, the authors re-analyzed transcripts of college student discussions of problematic situations involving cultural diversity and interpersonal conflict. The authors show how they identified metaphorical linguistic expressions and from them derived three conceptual metaphors (life is a journey, the problem is a barrier/maze, and the self is divided) that in turn formed patterns or constellations of meanings in students’ problem-solving strategies. As an interpretive tool, conceptual metaphors link certain isolated individual metaphors to these larger patterns of meaning, including ideological frameworks readily available in US culture.

Making Sense of Critical Suicide Studies: Metaphors, Tensions, and Futurities

“…Given suicide's unfathomable quality (Jaworski and Scott 2016) and its complex entanglement with other social problems and structures of inequality (Alvarez et al 2022;Fernández et al 2021), it is not surprising that participants turned to metaphorical language to express their understandings of the social relations constituting suicide, suicide prevention, and critical suicide studies. We discovered that metaphors were an important way of conceptualizing and reflecting upon critical suicide studies and thus we made active use of these metaphors in our analysis (Kochis and Gillespie 2006;Steger 2007;Cassell and Lee 2012;Cassell and Bishop 2019). In response to our main research question, "How do participants make sense of critical suicide studies?…”