In this chapter we describe an analytical framework and two types of analytical procedures for studying how people's talk and meaning-making relate to sets of meanings that are shared either locally or more broadly. The analytical procedures that we describe require that researchers pay close attention to language and language use, as well as to features of the local context and the larger culture. The researcher also needs to pay close attention to the relation of these larger cultural features to individual meaning-making.

We describe two kinds of analytical procedures. One kind focuses mainly on how people take shared sets of meanings into use in their talk and meaning-making. The second kind focuses mainly on how shared sets of meanings encourage certain ways of understanding oneself and others and discourage other ways. The procedures we describe treat interviews and other kinds of conversations as necessarily part of a larger social world beyond the immediate context in which the words are said. Thinking about conversations in this way moves the researcher's attention to what we call implicit cultural meanings – that is, meanings about some area of life that members of an interpretive community share and take for granted.

We begin with an overview of the analytical framework for the procedures for analysis we describe in this chapter. After that, we describe analytical procedures that enable a researcher to discern the implicit cultural meanings that a group of people share and to discern how they take those meanings into use. In the final section of the chapter, we describe analytical procedures that enable researchers to study individual meaning-making; these procedures concern how implicit cultural meanings may inform or restrict how people understand themselves and others.

Analytical framework: implicit cultural meanings

The general theoretical framework of this book holds that personal meanings and meaning-making are not idiosyncratic. Personal meanings are always fashioned within the network of possible meanings that are available in the interpretive communities of which the person is a member. People always understand events, other people, and themselves against a background of shared meanings. We use the expression implicit cultural meanings to denote meanings about some issue or area of life that are shared and taken for granted by the members of a particular social group or that are commonplace in the culture at large.