How to approach 'prejudice' and 'stereotypes' qualitatively: The search for a meaningful way

Abstract

This paper is partly a theoretical and analytical exploration of different ways to do research about stereotypes and prejudice, and partly a confessional tale of my journey. It is a journey that has been about looking for a meaningful and useful way of approaching empirical material collected in different research projects over more than 15 years, in an attempt to say something about how ordinary social actors talk (and possibly think) about prejudice and stereotypes. There is an immense volume of social psychological writing on this topic, and from that I discuss in detail several new(ish) discursive, critical and constructional approaches and the (im)possibility of applying them to my empirical material.