Strategic displays and evaluations of Irish national identification: A mixed methods investigation

The nation has often been viewed as a unifying force (Anderson, 1981); however, groups are rarely, if ever, completely united (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001). The national group is no exception, yet the social identity literature has largely ignored intra- and subgroup variability within the same nation. In order to challenge this pervasive image of the nation, a mixed methods approach was applied to consider variations that exist within the same national category. The first phase qualitative investigation applied a discursive approach to examine how Irish Travellers and Irish students negotiated their national identity in interaction. The findings suggested that individuals within the same interactional context displayed and constructed their national identity in different ways. Importantly, these divergent displays may also have had interactive consequences, as they marked individuals as being inside or outside of the national category. Additionally, ‘banality’ (Billig, 1995) was identified as a discursive resource mobilised by individuals in interaction as a marker of their entitlement to exclude others from the national group. The discursive findings informed the subsequent quantitative investigations; the first of which considered the effect of experimentally manipulated perceived prototypicality on evaluations of displays of Irishness. The findings indicated that participants displayed a degree of distance between themselves and the national group in their evaluations of displays. The second set of studies manipulated both participants' perceived prototypicality and that of a target group member. The effects of the manipulation on participants' assignment of national attributes and similarity judgements in both an intra- and intergroup comparative context were then considered. The findings indicated that prototypical and peripheral group members adjusted their distance to the national group, relative to other subgroups occupying different positions within the nation. The implications for discursive understandings of identity, the study of intra-national relations and policies of inclusion were then discussed.