“We All Had an Experience in There Together”: A Discursive Psychological Analysis of Collaborative Paranormal Accounts by Paranormal Investigation Team Members

Abstract

This is a study of the verbal accounts of paranormal investigators. The focus of analysis is upon the rhetorical organization of event descriptions in ways that establish the factual status of reports in order to highlight the inherent problems associated with current understandings of reports of spontaneous cases. Drawing upon a corpus of interviews conducted with six investigation group members, analysis was conducted using discursive psychology, in particular the rhetorical approach, with an examination of the ways in which accounts were presented and the interactional consequences of describing events in particular ways. Analysis revealed how speakers worked to imply the paranormal status of events while avoiding explicitly labelling experiences as “paranormal.” By focussing upon the production of event descriptions, the construction of intersubjectivity and the importance of the context in which accounts are elicited, the current work has implications for the way in which parapsychologists currently utilize and understand accounts of spontaneous cases.

Keywords:

• accounts
• collaborative
• discourse analysis
• discursive psychology
• memory
• paranormal