How we understand terms like ‘fake news’ or ‘immigration’ or ‘freedom’ tells us a lot, not just about the times we live in or the people using those terms, but groups that have power to change the discourse on such issues. That particular image is from Tagxedo. thanks in advance! Develop research questions and protocols for analysing discourses and discursive practices Identify different techniques of gathering discursive data for micro, meso and/or macro levels of analysis Select appropriate venues for sharing and distributing the results of research studies that use discourse analysis Critical discourse analysis (hardcore mode), “What we commonly accept as objective or obviously true is only so because of negotiated agreement among people” – Gee (2011). On the other hand, if you are interested in the specific communication strategies of one or two political actors, then the detailed speech patterns might start to be interesting again. Before you pick your sources, and decide what tools to use on them, ask yourself: what is my concern? Really helpful when you are snowed under with a pile of DA books. It can also be interesting to look at non-verbal communication: people’s facial expressions and hand movements are an important part of the context of what people say. Revised and updated, this third edition of Barbara Johnstones Discourse Analysis encourages students to think about discourse analysis as an open-ended set of techniques. I’m mainly focused on the communicative part of it. I will first discuss what is a good research question for a discourse analysis, and will then go over some of the fundamental issues you might want to settle before starting your project. Qualitative researchers often try to understand the world by listening to how people talk, but it can be really revealing to look at not just what people say, but how. I realize you’re not going to be able to follow up on a lot of the reading tips I’ve provided there, but you may want to see if you can get your hands on the following volume – it contains quite a bit of useful advice on how to analyze different types of materials (check out the amazon overview to see if this is at all helpful to you): Ruth Wodak’s edited book ‘Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences‘. To take on any identity at a given time and place we have to ‘talk the talk’…”         - Gee 2011. We promise people things, we open committee meetings, we propose to our lovers, we argue over politics, and we “talk to God”…, Language allows us to be things. Both of these papers are described as ‘critical’ discourse analysis. So for example: if the movie depicts specific gender roles, then it is drawing from practices in the social realm as its ‘resource’ for discursive construction, and this construction may then affects such practices down the road. One understandable temptation might be to limit oneself to reading political texts, to summarize them for others, and to then offer a personal interpretation. Maybe you want to know what arguments informed a major political decision, or you want to see how a politician manipulated a debate. We’re in agreement there, but I’m not sure I agree with the distinction between discursive and social practices you draw up. Thank you Dan, that means a lot. All the best They may also draw on narrative and thematic analysis. Try to turn your concern into a question and then narrow the scope of that question enough to make it “operational”. 94Analyzing Racism Through Discourse Analysis group members. A patient is wheeled into the ER/casualty unit, conscious but suffering from burns. Gee (2011) notes at least three different ways that the positionality of discourse can be shown to be constructed and non-universal: meanings and reality can change over time, between cultures, and finally with ‘discursive construction’ – due to power dynamics in setting language that controls how we understand concepts. Much of politics is expressed through texts, and closely examining both written and spoken language can provide useful insights into the political position of actors or the rhetoric that informs an argument. Discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that investigates the use of language in social contexts. In discourse analysis, interview data are analyzed at a macrosociologic level, as social texts. For instance, news discourse would be one such layer: it is governed by particular scripts, specific power relations, habits and conventions, jargon, etc. Just like so many blanket qualitative terms, there are a lot of different practices and types of analysis called ‘discourse’ analysis, and many different ways of applying them. What makes a discourse analysis about ‘discourse’ is ultimately your theoretical commitment to the idea that texts and social processes are connected (usually by the ways in which power and knowledge interact through language). It is possible in discourse analysis for a single sentence or word to be the major focus of the study, or it may look widely across many different people and data sources. It’s one of the few occasions that a keyword search in a qualitative corpus can be useful – because you are looking at the use of a single, non-replaceable word. Discourse analysis is an indirect form of observation, ... of research done in different disciplinary contexts" including language and communication, psychology, and ... the wider context as well as of the questions themselves, and consequently positioning themselves in relation to I am just unsure of how to approach this methodologically at this stage (research proposal) – I have read soo much my mind is blurred. It allows us to engage in actions and activities. Gee, in his book, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, gives an especially helpful overview of what types of questions can be asked and answered through a discourse analysis. In other words, you will likely be exploring qualitative aspects of the discourse. Good luck with the project! Thanks & regards, Cathrine. Dear Lena, For example, it can be revealing to look at how some people use a particular word, or terms from a particular local dialect. We can speak as experts—as doctors, lawyers, anime aficionados, or carpenters—or as ‘everyday people’. Qualitative research is designed to explore the human elements of a given topic, while specific qualitative methods examine how individuals see and experienc Gee notes that analy… Let me know what you think. On the other hand, if your subject matter generates a large amount of text, for instance thousands or tens of thousands of words, then you will have a hard time deciding which statements to analyse in detail. All the best My advice would be to get your hands on digital versions of your sources, or to generate these yourself by typing up speeches, transcribing interviews, or scanning news articles and running them through software that supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Glad to hear that, Isabel. Is this possible? For a case like this, you could create protocols of your materials first, outlining only which topics are mentioned in what time interval. (I’m a distance student based in Vietnam, so can access online sources much more readily than books). As for how to deal with the materials, have you seen my advice here on this website? Hi there! If you are looking for something more analytical, I usually use NVivo, but that’s not a free programme. In a case like that, I would use interviews and any publications or documents that the various groups and players produce, and I would indeed give a discourse analysis a go. But a more detailed, critical and contextual examination of the discourse might show that nurses struggle with out-moded power dynamics in hospitals (eg Fealy and McNamara 2007, Turner et al 2007). That would be more of a political economy or anthropology approach. This question has everything a good research project needs: relevance, a clear topic, potential sources, and a clear time-frame. Language and discourse are not absolute. 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