Health psychology and discourse: personal accounts as social texts in grounded theory

Traditional social psychology has largely located the origins of the social in the mental and emotional processes of individuals. Interview and questionnaire approaches have focused on the personal account as a route to cognitive processes and personality structures. In contrast, qualitative approaches like grounded theory have highlighted the importance of discourse in the constitution of the social world, and the function of talk and text in the construction of meaning. It is argued here that the use of such approaches, informed by insights from discourse analysis and current thinking on textuality, can enable analysts to read the personal account as a socially constructed, and constructing, text. This article uses examples from psychosocial oncology and from original research on the treatment experiences of a group of cancer patients to discuss new ways of reading personal accounts as social texts.