Chapter 11: Beyond Narrative and Discourse Analysis: Communication and Metacommunication Reunited

This book has covered a wide ground—ranging from looking at social networks of meaning-making to narrative construction of gender, from dinnertable conversations to story coherence. This range represents the scope of contemporary sociocultural studies, where qualitative research strategies are increasingly utilized to show the intricacies of psychological phenomena in their local contexts. The recent decades in the social sciences have led to a certain glorification of local nature of knowledge—or of the context-specificity of human psychological processes, and we think that this subject claims for a closer scrutiny.

Epistemological shifts are not only expected, but are absolutely necessary to catch up with welcome demands stemming from scientific development. The centrality of the principle of sociogenesis requires special reference at this point. Our search for scientific knowledge construction in developmental psychology definitely needs to make sense of the links between microgenesis and ontogenesis, between coconstruction processes taking place in the here-and-now and significant changes taking place along the individual ontogeny. The need to create models that relate developmental processes in Aktualgenese (microgenesis) and ontogenesis is pressing, and has had only very few productive solutions so far. It would necessitate widening of the notion of qualitative and quantitative data construction techniques (Valsiner & Diriwächter, 2004), new looks at sampling (Valsiner & Sato, 2004), and maintenance of relevant aspects of the phenomena in the data (Cairns, 1986).