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Discourse Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

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Discourse Analysis

Definition:

Discourse Analysis is a method of studying how people use language in different situations to understand what they really mean and what messages they are sending. It helps us understand how language is used to create social relationships and cultural norms.

It examines language use in various forms of communication such as spoken, written, visual or multi-modal texts, and focuses on how language is used to construct social meaning and relationships, and how it reflects and reinforces power dynamics, ideologies, and cultural norms.

Types of Discourse Analysis

Some of the most common types of discourse analysis are:

Conversation Analysis

This type of discourse analysis focuses on analyzing the structure of talk and how participants in a conversation make meaning through their interaction. It is often used to study face-to-face interactions, such as interviews or everyday conversations.

Critical discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on the ways in which language use reflects and reinforces power relations, social hierarchies, and ideologies. It is often used to analyze media texts or political speeches, with the aim of uncovering the hidden meanings and assumptions that are embedded in these texts.

Discursive Psychology

This type of discourse analysis focuses on the ways in which language use is related to psychological processes such as identity construction and attribution of motives. It is often used to study narratives or personal accounts, with the aim of understanding how individuals make sense of their experiences.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on analyzing not only language use, but also other modes of communication, such as images, gestures, and layout. It is often used to study digital or visual media, with the aim of understanding how different modes of communication work together to create meaning.

Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

This type of discourse analysis uses large collections of texts, or corpora, to analyze patterns of language use across different genres or contexts. It is often used to study language use in specific domains, such as academic writing or legal discourse.

Descriptive Discourse

This type of discourse analysis aims to describe the features and characteristics of language use, without making any value judgments or interpretations. It is often used in linguistic studies to describe grammatical structures or phonetic features of language.

Narrative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing the structure and content of stories or narratives, with the aim of understanding how they are constructed and how they shape our understanding of the world. It is often used to study personal narratives or cultural myths.

Expository Discourse

This type of discourse analysis is used to study texts that explain or describe a concept, process, or idea. It aims to understand how information is organized and presented in such texts and how it influences the reader’s understanding of the topic.

Argumentative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing texts that present an argument or attempt to persuade the reader or listener. It aims to understand how the argument is constructed, what strategies are used to persuade, and how the audience is likely to respond to the argument.

Discourse Analysis Conducting Guide

Here is a step-by-step guide for conducting discourse analysis:

• What are you trying to understand about the language use in a particular context?
• What are the key concepts or themes that you want to explore?
• Select the data: Decide on the type of data that you will analyze, such as written texts, spoken conversations, or media content. Consider the source of the data, such as news articles, interviews, or social media posts, and how this might affect your analysis.
• Transcribe or collect the data: If you are analyzing spoken language, you will need to transcribe the data into written form. If you are using written texts, make sure that you have access to the full text and that it is in a format that can be easily analyzed.
• Read and re-read the data: Read through the data carefully, paying attention to key themes, patterns, and discursive features. Take notes on what stands out to you and make preliminary observations about the language use.
• Develop a coding scheme : Develop a coding scheme that will allow you to categorize and organize different types of language use. This might include categories such as metaphors, narratives, or persuasive strategies, depending on your research question.
• Code the data: Use your coding scheme to analyze the data, coding different sections of text or spoken language according to the categories that you have developed. This can be a time-consuming process, so consider using software tools to assist with coding and analysis.
• Analyze the data: Once you have coded the data, analyze it to identify patterns and themes that emerge. Look for similarities and differences across different parts of the data, and consider how different categories of language use are related to your research question.
• Interpret the findings: Draw conclusions from your analysis and interpret the findings in relation to your research question. Consider how the language use in your data sheds light on broader cultural or social issues, and what implications it might have for understanding language use in other contexts.
• Write up the results: Write up your findings in a clear and concise way, using examples from the data to support your arguments. Consider how your research contributes to the broader field of discourse analysis and what implications it might have for future research.

Applications of Discourse Analysis

Here are some of the key areas where discourse analysis is commonly used:

• Political discourse: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze political speeches, debates, and media coverage of political events. By examining the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the political ideologies, values, and agendas that underpin different political positions.
• Media analysis: Discourse analysis is frequently used to analyze media content, including news reports, television shows, and social media posts. By examining the language used in media content, researchers can understand how media narratives are constructed and how they influence public opinion.
• Education : Discourse analysis can be used to examine classroom discourse, student-teacher interactions, and educational policies. By analyzing the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape educational outcomes.
• Healthcare : Discourse analysis is used in healthcare to examine the language used by healthcare professionals and patients in medical consultations. This can help to identify communication barriers, cultural differences, and other factors that may impact the quality of healthcare.
• Marketing and advertising: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze marketing and advertising messages, including the language used in product descriptions, slogans, and commercials. By examining these messages, researchers can gain insight into the cultural values and beliefs that underpin consumer behavior.

When to use Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a valuable research methodology that can be used in a variety of contexts. Here are some situations where discourse analysis may be particularly useful:

• When studying language use in a particular context: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used in a specific context, such as political speeches, media coverage, or healthcare interactions. By analyzing language use in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• When exploring the meaning of language: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. This can be particularly useful in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
• When examining power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to reinforce or challenge power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• When conducting qualitative research: Discourse analysis can be used as a qualitative research method, allowing researchers to explore complex social phenomena in depth. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain rich and nuanced insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.

Examples of Discourse Analysis

Here are some examples of discourse analysis in action:

• A study of media coverage of climate change: This study analyzed media coverage of climate change to examine how language was used to construct the issue. The researchers found that media coverage tended to frame climate change as a matter of scientific debate rather than a pressing environmental issue, thereby undermining public support for action on climate change.
• A study of political speeches: This study analyzed political speeches to examine how language was used to construct political identity. The researchers found that politicians used language strategically to construct themselves as trustworthy and competent leaders, while painting their opponents as untrustworthy and incompetent.
• A study of medical consultations: This study analyzed medical consultations to examine how language was used to negotiate power and authority between doctors and patients. The researchers found that doctors used language to assert their authority and control over medical decisions, while patients used language to negotiate their own preferences and concerns.
• A study of workplace interactions: This study analyzed workplace interactions to examine how language was used to construct social identity and maintain power relations. The researchers found that language was used to construct a hierarchy of power and status within the workplace, with those in positions of authority using language to assert their dominance over subordinates.

Purpose of Discourse Analysis

The purpose of discourse analysis is to examine the ways in which language is used to construct social meaning, relationships, and power relations. By analyzing language use in a systematic and rigorous way, discourse analysis can provide valuable insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication and interaction.

The specific purposes of discourse analysis may vary depending on the research context, but some common goals include:

• To understand how language constructs social reality: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain insight into the cultural and social factors that shape communication.
• To identify power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language use reinforces or challenges power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• To explore social and cultural norms: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how social and cultural norms are constructed and maintained through language use. By analyzing language use in different contexts, researchers can gain insight into how social and cultural norms are reproduced and challenged.
• To provide insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.

Characteristics of Discourse Analysis

Here are some key characteristics of discourse analysis:

• Focus on language use: Discourse analysis is centered on language use and how it constructs social meaning, relationships, and power relations.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
• Systematic and rigorous methodology: Discourse analysis employs a systematic and rigorous methodology, often involving transcription and coding of language data, in order to identify patterns and themes in language use.
• Contextual analysis : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use, and takes into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• Focus on power relations: Discourse analysis often examines power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society.
• Interpretive approach: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it seeks to understand the meaning and significance of language use from the perspective of the participants in a particular discourse.
• Emphasis on reflexivity: Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of reflexivity, or self-awareness, in the research process. Researchers are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality and how it may shape their interpretation of language use.

Advantages of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis has several advantages as a methodological approach. Here are some of the main advantages:

• Provides a detailed understanding of language use: Discourse analysis allows for a detailed and nuanced understanding of language use in specific social contexts. It enables researchers to identify patterns and themes in language use, and to understand how language constructs social reality.
• Emphasizes the importance of context : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use. By taking into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication, discourse analysis provides a more complete understanding of language use than other approaches.
• Allows for an examination of power relations: Discourse analysis enables researchers to examine power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society. By identifying problematic language use, discourse analysis can contribute to efforts to promote social justice and equality.
• Provides insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. This multidisciplinary approach allows for a more holistic understanding of language use in social contexts.

Limitations of Discourse Analysis

Some Limitations of Discourse Analysis are as follows:

• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Discourse analysis can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Collecting and transcribing language data can be a time-consuming task, and analyzing the data requires careful attention to detail and a significant investment of time and resources.
• Limited generalizability: Discourse analysis is often focused on a particular social context or community, and therefore the findings may not be easily generalized to other contexts or populations. This means that the insights gained from discourse analysis may have limited applicability beyond the specific context being studied.
• Interpretive nature: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it relies on the interpretation of the researcher to identify patterns and themes in language use. This subjectivity can be a limitation, as different researchers may interpret language data differently.
• Limited quantitative analysis: Discourse analysis tends to focus on qualitative analysis of language data, which can limit the ability to draw statistical conclusions or make quantitative comparisons across different language uses or contexts.
• Ethical considerations: Discourse analysis may involve the collection and analysis of sensitive language data, such as language related to trauma or marginalization. Researchers must carefully consider the ethical implications of collecting and analyzing this type of data, and ensure that the privacy and confidentiality of participants is protected.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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21 Great Examples of Discourse Analysis

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Discourse analysis is an approach to the study of language that demonstrates how language shapes reality. It usually takes the form of a textual or content analysis .

Discourse is understood as a way of perceiving, framing, and viewing the world.

For example:

• A dominant discourse of gender often positions women as gentle and men as active heroes.
• A dominant discourse of race often positions whiteness as the norm and colored bodies as ‘others’ (see: social construction of race )

Through discourse analysis, scholars look at texts and examine how those texts shape discourse.

In other words, it involves the examination of how the ‘ways of speaking about things’ normalizes and privileges some frames of thinking about things while marginalizing others.

As a simple example, if movies consistently frame the ideal female as passive, silent, and submissive, then society comes to think that this is how women should behave and makes us think that this is normal , so women who don’t fit this mold are abnormal .

Instead of seeing this as just the way things are, discourse analysts know that norms are produced in language and are not necessarily as natural as we may have assumed.

Examples of Discourse Analysis

1. language choice in policy texts.

A study of policy texts can reveal ideological frameworks and viewpoints of the writers of the policy. These sorts of studies often demonstrate how policy texts often categorize people in ways that construct social hierarchies and restrict people’s agency .

Examples include:

2. Newspaper Bias

Conducting a critical discourse analysis of newspapers involves gathering together a quorum of newspaper articles based on a pre-defined range and scope (e.g. newspapers from a particular set of publishers within a set date range).

Then, the researcher conducts a close examination of the texts to examine how they frame subjects (i.e. people, groups of people, etc.) from a particular ideological, political, or cultural perspective.

3. Language in Interviews

Discourse analysis can also be utilized to analyze interview transcripts. While coding methods to identify themes are the most common methods for analyzing interviews, discourse analysis is a valuable approach when looking at power relations and the framing of subjects through speech.

4. Television Analysis

Discourse analysis is commonly used to explore ideologies and framing devices in television shows and advertisements.

Due to the fact advertising is not just textual but rather multimodal , scholars often mix a discourse analytic methodology (i.e. exploring how television constructs dominant ways of thinking) with semiotic methods (i.e. exploration of how color, movement, font choice, and so on create meaning).

I did this, for example, in my PhD (listed below).

5. Film Critique

Scholars can explore discourse in film in a very similar way to how they study discourse in television shows. This can include the framing of sexuality gender, race, nationalism, and social class in films.

A common example is the study of Disney films and how they construct idealized feminine and masculine identities that children should aspire toward.

6. Analysis of Political Speech

Political speeches have also been subject to a significant amount of discourse analysis. These studies generally explore how influential politicians indicate a shift in policy and frame those policy shifts in the context of underlying ideological assumptions.

9. Examining Marketing Texts

Advertising is more present than ever in the context of neoliberal capitalism. As a result, it has an outsized role in shaping public discourse. Critical discourse analyses of advertising texts tend to explore how advertisements, and the capitalist context that underpins their proliferation, normalize gendered, racialized, and class-based discourses.

11. Analyzing Lesson Plans

As written texts, lesson plans can be analyzed for how they construct discourses around education as well as student and teacher identities. These texts tend to examine how teachers and governing bodies in education prioritize certain ideologies around what and how to learn. These texts can enter into discussions around the ‘history wars’ (what and whose history should be taught) as well as ideological approaches to religious and language learning.

12. Looking at Graffiti

One of my favorite creative uses of discourse analysis is in the study of graffiti. By looking at graffiti, researchers can identify how youth countercultures and counter discourses are spread through subversive means. These counterdiscourses offer ruptures where dominant discourses can be unsettled and displaced.

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The Origins of Discourse Analysis

1. foucault.

French philosopher Michel Foucault is a central thinker who shaped discourse analysis. His work in studies like Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality demonstrate how our ideas about insanity and sexuality have been shaped through language.

The ways the church speaks about sex, for example, shapes people’s thoughts and feelings about it.

The church didn’t simply make sex a silent taboo. Rather, it actively worked to teach people that desire was a thing of evil, forcing them to suppress their desires.

Over time, society at large developed a suppressed normative approach to the concept of sex that is not necessarily normal except for the fact that the church reiterates that this is the only acceptable way of thinking about the topic.

Similarly, in Madness and Civilization , a discourse around insanity was examined. Medical discourse pathologized behaviors that were ‘abnormal’ as signs of insanity. Were the dominant medical discourse to change, it’s possible that abnormal people would no longer be seen as insane.

One clear example of this is homosexuality. Up until the 1990s, being gay was seen in medical discourse as an illness. Today, most of Western society sees that this way of looking at homosexuality was extremely damaging and exclusionary, and yet at the time, because it was the dominant discourse, people didn’t question it.

2. Norman Fairclough

Fairclough (2013), inspired by Foucault, created some key methodological frameworks for conducting discourse analysis.

Fairclough was one of the first scholars to articulate some frameworks around exploring ‘text as discourse’ and provided key tools for scholars to conduct analyses of newspaper and policy texts.

Today, most methodology chapters in dissertations that use discourse analysis will have extensive discussions of Fairclough’s methods.

Discourse analysis is a popular primary research method in media studies, cultural studies, education studies, and communication studies. It helps scholars to show how texts and language have the power to shape people’s perceptions of reality and, over time, shift dominant ways of framing thought. It also helps us to see how power flows thought texts, creating ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ in society.

Key examples of discourse analysis include the study of television, film, newspaper, advertising, political speeches, and interviews.

Al Kharusi, R. (2017). Ideologies of Arab media and politics: a CDA of Al Jazeera debates on the Yemeni revolution. PhD Dissertation: University of Hertfordshire.

Alaazi, D. A., Ahola, A. N., Okeke-Ihejirika, P., Yohani, S., Vallianatos, H., & Salami, B. (2021). Immigrants and the Western media: a CDA of newspaper framings of African immigrant parenting in Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , 47 (19), 4478-4496. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1798746

Al-Khawaldeh, N. N., Khawaldeh, I., Bani-Khair, B., & Al-Khawaldeh, A. (2017). An exploration of graffiti on university’s walls: A corpus-based discourse analysis study. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics , 7 (1), 29-42. Doi: https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v7i1.6856

Alsaraireh, M. Y., Singh, M. K. S., & Hajimia, H. (2020). Critical DA of gender representation of male and female characters in the animation movie, Frozen. Linguistica Antverpiensia , 104-121.

Baig, F. Z., Khan, K., & Aslam, M. J. (2021). Child Rearing and Gender Socialisation: A Feminist CDA of Kids’ Popular Fictional Movies. Journal of Educational Research and Social Sciences Review (JERSSR) , 1 (3), 36-46.

Barker, M. E. (2021). Exploring Canadian Integration through CDA of English Language Lesson Plans for Immigrant Learners. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée , 24 (1), 75-91. Doi: https://doi.org/10.37213/cjal.2021.28959

Coleman, B. (2017). An Ideological Unveiling: Using Critical Narrative and Discourse Analysis to Examine Discursive White Teacher Identity. AERA Online Paper Repository .

Drew, C. (2013). Soak up the goodness: Discourses of Australian childhoods on television advertisements, 2006-2012. PhD Dissertation: Australian Catholic University. Doi: https://doi.org/10.4226/66/5a9780223babd

Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language . London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction . London: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (2003). Madness and civilization . New York: Routledge.

Hahn, A. D. (2018). Uncovering the ideologies of internationalization in lesson plans through CDA. The New English Teacher , 12 (1), 121-121.

Isti’anah, A. (2018). Rohingya in media: CDA of Myanmar and Bangladesh newspaper headlines. Language in the Online and Offline World , 6 , 18-23. Doi: http://repository.usd.ac.id/id/eprint/25962

Khan, M. H., Adnan, H. M., Kaur, S., Qazalbash, F., & Ismail, I. N. (2020). A CDA of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Donald Trump’s historic 2016 AIPAC policy speech. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs , 40 (4), 543-558. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2020.1828507

Louise Cooper, K., Luck, L., Chang, E., & Dixon, K. (2021). What is the practice of spiritual care? A CDA of registered nurses’ understanding of spirituality. Nursing Inquiry , 28 (2), e12385. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12385

Mohammadi, D., Momeni, S., & Labafi, S. (2021). Representation of Iranians family’s life style in TV advertising (Case study: food ads). Religion & Communication , 27 (58), 333-379.

Munro, M. (2018) House price inflation in the news: a CDA of newspaper coverage in the UK. Housing Studies, 33(7), pp. 1085-1105. doi: 10.1080/02673037.2017.1421911

Ravn, I. M., Frederiksen, K., & Beedholm, K. (2016). The chronic responsibility: a CDA of Danish chronic care policies. Qualitative Health Research , 26 (4), 545-554. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1049732315570133

Sengul, K. (2019). Critical discourse analysis in political communication research: a case study of right-wing populist discourse in Australia. Communication Research and Practice , 5 (4), 376-392. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2019.1695082

Serafis, D., Kitis, E. D., & Archakis, A. (2018). Graffiti slogans and the construction of collective identity: evidence from the anti-austerity protests in Greece. Text & Talk , 38 (6), 775-797. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2018-0023

Suphaborwornrat, W., & Punkasirikul, P. (2022). A Multimodal CDA of Online Soft Drink Advertisements. LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network , 15 (1), 627-653.

Symes, C., & Drew, C. (2017). Education on the rails: a textual ethnography of university advertising in mobile contexts. Critical Studies in Education , 58 (2), 205-223. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1252783

Thomas, S. (2005). The construction of teacher identities in educational policy documents: A critical discourse analysis. Critical Studies in Education , 46 (2), 25-44. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508480509556423

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What (Exactly) Is Discourse Analysis? A Plain-Language Explanation & Definition (With Examples)

By: Jenna Crosley (PhD). Expert Reviewed By: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | June 2021

Discourse analysis is one of the most popular qualitative analysis techniques we encounter at Grad Coach. If you’ve landed on this post, you’re probably interested in discourse analysis, but you’re not sure whether it’s the right fit for your project, or you don’t know where to start. If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Overview: Discourse Analysis Basics

In this post, we’ll explain in plain, straightforward language :

• What discourse analysis is
• When to use discourse analysis
• The main approaches to discourse analysis
• How to conduct discourse analysis

What is discourse analysis?

Let’s start with the word “discourse”.

In its simplest form, discourse is verbal or written communication between people that goes beyond a single sentence . Importantly, discourse is more than just language. The term “language” can include all forms of linguistic and symbolic units (even things such as road signs), and language studies can focus on the individual meanings of words. Discourse goes beyond this and looks at the overall meanings conveyed by language in context .  “Context” here refers to the social, cultural, political, and historical background of the discourse, and it is important to take this into account to understand underlying meanings expressed through language.

A popular way of viewing discourse is as language used in specific social contexts, and as such language serves as a means of prompting some form of social change or meeting some form of goal.

Now that we’ve defined discourse, let’s look at discourse analysis .

Discourse analysis uses the language presented in a corpus or body of data to draw meaning . This body of data could include a set of interviews or focus group discussion transcripts. While some forms of discourse analysis center in on the specifics of language (such as sounds or grammar), other forms focus on how this language is used to achieve its aims. We’ll dig deeper into these two above-mentioned approaches later.

As Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2008) put it: “discourse analysis provides a general framework to problem-oriented social research”. Basically, discourse analysis is used to conduct research on the use of language in context in a wide variety of social problems (i.e., issues in society that affect individuals negatively).

For example, discourse analysis could be used to assess how language is used to express differing viewpoints on financial inequality and would look at how the topic should or shouldn’t be addressed or resolved, and whether this so-called inequality is perceived as such by participants.

What makes discourse analysis unique is that it posits that social reality is socially constructed , or that our experience of the world is understood from a subjective standpoint. Discourse analysis goes beyond the literal meaning of words and languages

For example, people in countries that make use of a lot of censorship will likely have their knowledge, and thus views, limited by this, and will thus have a different subjective reality to those within countries with more lax laws on censorship.

When should you use discourse analysis?

There are many ways to analyze qualitative data (such as content analysis , narrative analysis , and thematic analysis ), so why should you choose discourse analysis? Well, as with all analysis methods, the nature of your research aims, objectives and research questions (i.e. the purpose of your research) will heavily influence the right choice of analysis method.

The purpose of discourse analysis is to investigate the functions of language (i.e., what language is used for) and how meaning is constructed in different contexts, which, to recap, include the social, cultural, political, and historical backgrounds of the discourse.

For example, if you were to study a politician’s speeches, you would need to situate these speeches in their context, which would involve looking at the politician’s background and views, the reasons for presenting the speech, the history or context of the audience, and the country’s social and political history (just to name a few – there are always multiple contextual factors).

Discourse analysis can also tell you a lot about power and power imbalances , including how this is developed and maintained, how this plays out in real life (for example, inequalities because of this power), and how language can be used to maintain it. For example, you could look at the way that someone with more power (for example, a CEO) speaks to someone with less power (for example, a lower-level employee).

Therefore, you may consider discourse analysis if you are researching:

• Some form of power or inequality (for example, how affluent individuals interact with those who are less wealthy
• How people communicate in a specific context (such as in a social situation with colleagues versus a board meeting)
• Ideology and how ideas (such as values and beliefs) are shared using language (like in political speeches)
• How communication is used to achieve social goals (such as maintaining a friendship or navigating conflict)

As you can see, discourse analysis can be a powerful tool for assessing social issues , as well as power and power imbalances . So, if your research aims and objectives are oriented around these types of issues, discourse analysis could be a good fit for you.

Discourse Analysis: The main approaches

There are two main approaches to discourse analysis. These are the language-in-use (also referred to as socially situated text and talk ) approaches and the socio-political approaches (most commonly Critical Discourse Analysis ). Let’s take a look at each of these.

Approach #1: Language-in-use

Language-in-use approaches focus on the finer details of language used within discourse, such as sentence structures (grammar) and phonology (sounds). This approach is very descriptive and is seldom seen outside of studies focusing on literature and/or linguistics.

Because of its formalist roots, language-in-use pays attention to different rules of communication, such as grammaticality (i.e., when something “sounds okay” to a native speaker of a language). Analyzing discourse through a language-in-use framework involves identifying key technicalities of language used in discourse and investigating how the features are used within a particular social context.

For example, English makes use of affixes (for example, “un” in “unbelievable”) and suffixes (“able” in “unbelievable”) but doesn’t typically make use of infixes (units that can be placed within other words to alter their meaning). However, an English speaker may say something along the lines of, “that’s un-flipping-believable”. From a language-in-use perspective, the infix “flipping” could be investigated by assessing how rare the phenomenon is in English, and then answering questions such as, “What role does the infix play?” or “What is the goal of using such an infix?”

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Approach #2: Socio-political

Socio-political approaches to discourse analysis look beyond the technicalities of language and instead focus on the influence that language has in social context , and vice versa. One of the main socio-political approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis , which focuses on power structures (for example, the power dynamic between a teacher and a student) and how discourse is influenced by society and culture. Critical Discourse Analysis is born out of Michel Foucault’s early work on power, which focuses on power structures through the analysis of normalized power .

Normalized power is ingrained and relatively allusive. It’s what makes us exist within society (and within the underlying norms of society, as accepted in a specific social context) and do the things that we need to do. Contrasted to this, a more obvious form of power is repressive power , which is power that is actively asserted.

Sounds a bit fluffy? Let’s look at an example.

Consider a situation where a teacher threatens a student with detention if they don’t stop speaking in class. This would be an example of repressive power (i.e. it was actively asserted).

Normalized power, on the other hand, is what makes us not want to talk in class . It’s the subtle clues we’re given from our environment that tell us how to behave, and this form of power is so normal to us that we don’t even realize that our beliefs, desires, and decisions are being shaped by it.

In the view of Critical Discourse Analysis, language is power and, if we want to understand power dynamics and structures in society, we must look to language for answers. In other words, analyzing the use of language can help us understand the social context, especially the power dynamics.

While the above-mentioned approaches are the two most popular approaches to discourse analysis, other forms of analysis exist. For example, ethnography-based discourse analysis and multimodal analysis. Ethnography-based discourse analysis aims to gain an insider understanding of culture , customs, and habits through participant observation (i.e. directly observing participants, rather than focusing on pre-existing texts).

On the other hand, multimodal analysis focuses on a variety of texts that are both verbal and nonverbal (such as a combination of political speeches and written press releases). So, if you’re considering using discourse analysis, familiarize yourself with the various approaches available so that you can make a well-informed decision.

How to “do” discourse analysis

As every study is different, it’s challenging to outline exactly what steps need to be taken to complete your research. However, the following steps can be used as a guideline if you choose to adopt discourse analysis for your research.

Step 1: Decide on your discourse analysis approach

The first step of the process is to decide on which approach you will take in terms. For example, the language in use approach or a socio-political approach such as critical discourse analysis. To do this, you need to consider your research aims, objectives and research questions . Of course, this means that you need to have these components clearly defined. If you’re still a bit uncertain about these, check out our video post covering topic development here.

While discourse analysis can be exploratory (as in, used to find out about a topic that hasn’t really been touched on yet), it is still vital to have a set of clearly defined research questions to guide your analysis. Without these, you may find that you lack direction when you get to your analysis. Since discourse analysis places such a focus on context, it is also vital that your research questions are linked to studying language within context.

Based on your research aims, objectives and research questions, you need to assess which discourse analysis would best suit your needs. Importantly, you  need to adopt an approach that aligns with your study’s purpose . So, think carefully about what you are investigating and what you want to achieve, and then consider the various options available within discourse analysis.

It’s vital to determine your discourse analysis approach from the get-go , so that you don’t waste time randomly analyzing your data without any specific plan.

Step 2: Design your collection method and gather your data

Once you’ve got determined your overarching approach, you can start looking at how to collect your data. Data in discourse analysis is drawn from different forms of “talk” and “text” , which means that it can consist of interviews , ethnographies, discussions, case studies, blog posts.  

The type of data you collect will largely depend on your research questions (and broader research aims and objectives). So, when you’re gathering your data, make sure that you keep in mind the “what”, “who” and “why” of your study, so that you don’t end up with a corpus full of irrelevant data. Discourse analysis can be very time-consuming, so you want to ensure that you’re not wasting time on information that doesn’t directly pertain to your research questions.

When considering potential collection methods, you should also consider the practicalities . What type of data can you access in reality? How many participants do you have access to and how much time do you have available to collect data and make sense of it? These are important factors, as you’ll run into problems if your chosen methods are impractical in light of your constraints.

Once you’ve determined your data collection method, you can get to work with the collection.

Step 3: Investigate the context

A key part of discourse analysis is context and understanding meaning in context. For this reason, it is vital that you thoroughly and systematically investigate the context of your discourse. Make sure that you can answer (at least the majority) of the following questions:

• What is the discourse?
• Why does the discourse exist? What is the purpose and what are the aims of the discourse?
• When did the discourse take place?
• Where did it happen?
• Who participated in the discourse? Who created it and who consumed it?
• What does the discourse say about society in general?
• How is meaning being conveyed in the context of the discourse?

Make sure that you include all aspects of the discourse context in your analysis to eliminate any confounding factors. For example, are there any social, political, or historical reasons as to why the discourse would exist as it does? What other factors could contribute to the existence of the discourse? Discourse can be influenced by many factors, so it is vital that you take as many of them into account as possible.

Once you’ve investigated the context of your data, you’ll have a much better idea of what you’re working with, and you’ll be far more familiar with your content. It’s then time to begin your analysis.

Step 4: Analyze your data

When performing a discourse analysis, you’ll need to look for themes and patterns .  To do this, you’ll start by looking at codes , which are specific topics within your data. You can find more information about the qualitative data coding process here.

Next, you’ll take these codes and identify themes. Themes are patterns of language (such as specific words or sentences) that pop up repeatedly in your data, and that can tell you something about the discourse. For example, if you’re wanting to know about women’s perspectives of living in a certain area, potential themes may be “safety” or “convenience”.

In discourse analysis, it is important to reach what is called data saturation . This refers to when you’ve investigated your topic and analyzed your data to the point where no new information can be found. To achieve this, you need to work your way through your data set multiple times, developing greater depth and insight each time. This can be quite time consuming and even a bit boring at times, but it’s essential.

Once you’ve reached the point of saturation, you should have an almost-complete analysis and you’re ready to move onto the next step – final review.

Step 5: Review your work

Hey, you’re nearly there. Good job! Now it’s time to review your work.

This final step requires you to return to your research questions and compile your answers to them, based on the analysis. Make sure that you can answer your research questions thoroughly, and also substantiate your responses with evidence from your data.

Usually, discourse analysis studies make use of appendices, which are referenced within your thesis or dissertation. This makes it easier for reviewers or markers to jump between your analysis (and findings) and your corpus (your evidence) so that it’s easier for them to assess your work.

When answering your research questions, make you should also revisit your research aims and objectives , and assess your answers against these. This process will help you zoom out a little and give you a bigger picture view. With your newfound insights from the analysis, you may find, for example, that it makes sense to expand the research question set a little to achieve a more comprehensive view of the topic.

Let’s recap…

In this article, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. The key takeaways are:

• Discourse analysis is a qualitative analysis method used to draw meaning from language in context.
• You should consider using discourse analysis when you wish to analyze the functions and underlying meanings of language in context.
• The two overarching approaches to discourse analysis are language-in-use and socio-political approaches .
• The main steps involved in undertaking discourse analysis are deciding on your analysis approach (based on your research questions), choosing a data collection method, collecting your data, investigating the context of your data, analyzing your data, and reviewing your work.

If you have any questions about discourse analysis, feel free to leave a comment below. If you’d like 1-on-1 help with your analysis, book an initial consultation with a friendly Grad Coach to see how we can help.

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33 Comments

This was really helpful to me

I would like to know the importance of discourse analysis analysis to academic writing

In academic writing coherence and cohesion are very important. DA will assist us to decide cohesiveness of the continuum of discourse that are used in it. We can judge it well.

Thank you so much for this piece, can you please direct how I can use Discourse Analysis to investigate politics of ethnicity in a particular society

Fantastically helpful! Could you write on how discourse analysis can be done using computer aided technique? Many thanks

I would like to know if I can use discourse analysis to research on electoral integrity deviation and when election are considered free & fair

I also to know the importance of discourse analysis and it’s purpose and characteristics

This is helpful. It is highly informative. Thank you. Is it possible to use more one analysis technique? I would to book for personal assistance. I am doing my Methodology chapter for a PhD Thesis.

Thanks, we are doing discourse analysis as a subject this year and this helped a lot!

Please can you help explain and answer this question? With illustrations,Hymes’ Acronym SPEAKING, as a feature of Discourse Analysis.

What are the three objectives of discourse analysis especially on the topic how people communicate between doctor and patient

Very useful Thank you for your work and information

thank you so much , I wanna know more about discourse analysis tools , such as , latent analysis , active powers analysis, proof paths analysis, image analysis, rhetorical analysis, propositions analysis, and so on, I wish I can get references about it , thanks in advance

Its beyond my expectations. It made me clear everything which I was struggling since last 4 months. 👏 👏 👏 👏

Thank you so much … It is clear and helpful

Thanks for sharing this material. My question is related to the online newspaper articles on COVID -19 pandemic the way this new normal is constructed as a social reality. How discourse analysis is an appropriate approach to examine theese articles?

This very helpful and interesting information

This was incredible! And massively helpful.

I’m seeking further assistance if you don’t mind.

Found it worth consuming!

What are the four types of discourse analysis?

very helpful. And I’d like to know more about Ethnography-based discourse analysis as I’m studying arts and humanities, I’d like to know how can I use it in my study.

Amazing info. Very happy to read this helpful piece of documentation. Thank you.

is discourse analysis can take data from medias like TV, Radio…?

I need to know what is general discourse analysis

Direct to the point, simple and deep explanation. this is helpful indeed.

Thank you so much was really helpful

really impressive

Thank you very much, for the clear explanations and examples.

It is really awesome. Anybody within just in 5 minutes understand this critical topic so easily. Thank you so much.

Thank you for enriching my knowledge on Discourse Analysis . Very helpful thanks again

This was extremely helpful. I feel less anxious now. Thank you so much.

Extremely helpful, I am going to be working on CDA about animal rights, particularly stray dogs using social media content, and I was so lost, thank you for clearly illustrating how the research should go forward, thank you

This is helpful. It is highly informative. Thank you. Is it possible to use more than one analysis technique in a single study? I would like to book for personal assistance. I am doing my Methodology chapter for a PhD Thesis.

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• How it works

Discourse Analysis – A Definitive Guide With Steps & Types

Published by Alvin Nicolas at August 14th, 2021 , Revised On August 29, 2023

What is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse analysis is an essential aspect of studying a language and its uses in day-to-day life.

It aims to gain in-depth knowledge about the language and identify its association with society, culture, and people’s perception.

It is used in various social science and humanities disciplines, such as linguistic, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.

Aims of Discourse Analysis

It focuses on

• The clear, in-depth meaning of the language.
• The uses of language and its effects.
• The association of the language with cultures, interpersonal relationships, and communication.
• Various components of the language like vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, tone of voice, fonts, and written form.

Uses of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is

• Used to study the language and its applications in texts and contexts.
• It focuses on the entire conversation and real text instead of constructed or artificial text.
• It helps linguists to know the role of language in improving the understanding of people.
• It enables teachers to learn many language strategies to teach students writing/speaking skills better.

Materials Used in Discourse Analysis

The material includes

Types of Discourse

What to Analyse?

Does your Research Methodology Have the Following?

• Great Research/Sources
• Perfect Language
• Accurate Sources

If not, we can help. Our panel of experts makes sure to keep the 3 pillars of Research Methodology strong.

How to Conduct Discourse Analysis?

While conducting discourse analysis, you need to focus on the following points.

• Purpose of the writer
• The context of the speech/passage
• Type of the language used.
• The organisation of the text

You need to interpret the meaning and context of the discourse based on the available material and resources. There are various methods to conduct discourse analysis, but we are discussing the most basic method below.

Step1: Develop a Research Question

Like any other research in discourse analysis, it’s essential to have a  research question  to proceed with your study.  After selecting your research question, you need to find out the relevant resources to find the answer to it. Discourse analysis can be applied to smaller or larger samples depending on your research’s aims and requirements.

Example : If you want to find out the impact of plagiarism on the credibility of the authors. You can examine the relevant materials available on the topic from the internet, newspapers, and books published during the past 5-10 years.

Step 2: Collect Information and Establish the Context

After formulating a research question, you can  review the literature and find out the details about the source material, such as:

• Who is the author?
• What is the year and date of publication?
• What’s the name of the publication?
• What country and place is it from?
• What language is used?
• How and where did you find it?
• How can others get access to the same source?
• What kind of impact did it make on its audience?
• What’s the association between discourse material and real life?

These questions enable you to construct a strong evidence-based theory about your study.

Example: While investigating the history and origin of a particular religion. You also have to research the political events, culture, language of the people, and their association with society.

Generally, details about the publication and production of the material are available in the  about section on their online websites. If you don’t find the relevant information online, don’t hesitate to contact the editor or publication via email, phone calls, etc. 

Step 3: Analyse the Content

In this step, you should analyse various aspects of the materials such as:

• Sentence structure
• Inter-relationship between the text
• Layout and Page quality (if you are using offline materials)
• Links, comments, technical excellence, readability, multimedia content (if you are using online material)
• The genre of the source (a news item, political speech, a report, interview, biography, commentary, etc.)

The analysis of these elements gives you a clear understanding, and you can present your findings more accurately.  Once you have analysed the above features, you should analyse the following aspects:

• The structure of the argument
• The role of the introduction and conclusion of the material
• The context of the material
• Patterns and themes
• Discursive statements (arguments, perspective, thoughts of the writer/speaker
• Grammatical features (use of pronouns, adjectives, phrases, active or passive voice, and their meaning)
• Literary figures (idioms, similes, metaphors, allegories, proverbs)

Step 4: Interpret the Data

Now you have all the information, but the question that arises here is: 

What does it all mean?

To answer this question,  compile all your findings  to explain the meaning and context of the discourse.

Step 5: Present your Findings

It’s time to present your results. Throughout the process, you gathered detailed notes of the discourse, building a strong presentation or thesis. You can use the references of other relevant sources as evidence to support your discussion. Always try to make your paper interesting to grab the attention of the reader.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Discourse Analysis

• It provides a way of thinking and analysing the problem.
• It enables us to understand the context and perception of the speaker.
• It can be applied at any given time, place, and people.
• It helps to learn any language its origin and association with society and culture.

Disadvantages

• There are many options available as each tradition has its own concepts, procedures, and a specific understanding of discourse and its analysis.
• Discourse analysis doesn’t help to find out the answer to scientific problems.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to describe the discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis examines language use in context. It studies how communication shapes and reflects social meaning, power dynamics, and cultural norms. By analyzing spoken, written, or visual language, it unveils hidden ideologies, identities, and social structures within various contexts.

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Discourse analysis: Step-by-step guide with examples

What is a discourse analysis, the application of discourse analysis in the academic thesis, discourse analysis with maxqda.

• Step 1: Importing data
• Step 2: Coding data
• Step 3: Creating Codebook
• Step 4: Visualize data

Literature about MAXQDA

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

MAXQDA supports various methodological approaches, including discourse analysis. This guide will introduce you to the tools of MAXQDA, which are ideal for performing discourse analysis with MAXQDA quickly and easily. MAXQDA is a qualitative data analysis software that helps you import, code, and identify patterns in your discourse.

Discourse analysis is a multidisciplinary method used in the humanities and social sciences to develop a deeper understanding of the interactions between language, society, and culture. It focuses on the study of linguistic expressions, structures, and practices in order to capture social meanings and power dynamics. Both verbal and nonverbal communication are considered. The overarching goal of discourse analysis is to explore how discourses influence the construction of knowledge, identities, and social relations. It enables the study of the role of language and communication in shaping and influencing social reality. Overall, discourse analysis makes a valuable contribution to the study of social phenomena and processes by providing an in-depth understanding of how language and communication are used to create meanings, shape social relationships, and establish social power dynamics. Discourse analysis contributes to critical reflection and knowledge acquisition in various academic disciplines.

A primary motivation for using discourse analysis is the ability to uncover dominant discourses, ideological assumptions, and power structures in texts, media content, or political speeches. Discourse analysis allows researchers to better understand and critically reflect on the role of language and discourse in society. Another important area of application of discourse analysis in dissertations is the study of the relationship between discourses and identity constructions. For example, gender roles, ethnic identities, or sexual orientations can be studied. Discourse analysis can help to understand how identities are negotiated, constructed, and reproduced in specific social contexts. Another area of application in dissertations is the study of discourses in the media. The analysis of media discourses makes it possible to identify, critically expose and reflect on patterns and trends in reporting. This can contribute to a better understanding of the media’s role in constructing and disseminating discourses. In summary, discourse analysis offers a valuable methodological perspective for the study of complex social phenomena in the context of academic work.

Researchers typically follow these steps in discourse analysis: defining the research question, selecting relevant textual data, coding and categorizing the data, analyzing patterns and meanings within the discourse, interpreting the results, and documenting their findings in written form. The specific steps may vary depending on the research question and methodology.

As mentioned earlier, there are clear advantages to using software like MAXQDA to conduct discourse analysis. With MAXQDA, you can segment data, code it, and develop analytical ideas all at the same time. This makes the process more efficient and allows you to refine your theoretical approaches in real time. If you do not have a MAXQDA License yet, download the free 14-day trial to get started:

Download free trial

Step 1 of the discourse analysis with MAXQDA: Importing data

Importing data into MAXQDA is a crucial step in beginning the analysis of qualitative data. MAXQDA provides several options for importing data into the program, allowing you to effectively organize your research materials. You can import different types of data, such as text documents, transcripts, media content, or existing MAXQDA Projects. MAXQDA gives you the flexibility to import both individual files and entire folders of data, which is especially helpful when working with large data sets. The import process is designed to be simple and user-friendly, making it easier for you to work with your data.Another advantage of MAXQDA is that it supports a wide variety of file formats. You can import files in various formats, including TXT, DOC, PDF, MP3, MP4 and many more. This versatility allows you to work with different types of data and incorporate different media into your analysis.Importing your data into MAXQDA makes it structured and accessible for further analysis. Within MAXQDA, you can organize, code, and link your data with other analytical tools. This makes it easier to navigate and access relevant information during the analysis process.Overall, importing data into MAXQDA is an efficient way to manage your qualitative research materials and prepare them for analysis. It serves as a critical first step in launching your project in MAXQDA and taking full advantage of the program’s extensive analytical capabilities.

Importing data into MAXQA plays a crucial role in conducting discourse analysis. With MAXQDA, you can segment your data into documents and annotate them with relevant metadata such as title, author, and date. This allows you to organize your texts during the analysis phase. You can sort, filter, and group your data based on various criteria to access specific texts. In addition, MAXQDA provides the ability to annotate the imported text with notes, comments, or memos. This feature is invaluable for capturing important information, thoughts, or interpretations that arise during analysis. You can document your observations and insights directly in MAXQDA, thus fostering a comprehensive understanding of the discourse being analyzed.In MAXQDA, you can assign meaningful titles to your data and include relevant metadata such as author and date in the document names. This ensures a clear organization of your texts during the analysis phase. You can sort, filter, and group your data according to various criteria to access specific texts. In addition, MAXQDA allows you to annotate the imported texts with comments and notes using memos. This feature is very useful for capturing key information, thoughts, or interpretations that emerge during the analysis. You can document your observations and insights directly in MAXQDA and develop a thorough understanding of the discourse being analyzed. Importing data into MAXQDA is fundamental to conducting a systematic and comprehensive discourse analysis.The structured organization of data in MAXQDA facilitates the effective application of various analysis methods and techniques. You can create codes to identify and analyze important themes, terms, or patterns within the discourse. Importing data into MAXQDA provides a central platform where you can manage, analyze, and interpret your data. This greatly streamlines the entire process of discourse analysis, allowing you to make informed statements about social meanings, power dynamics, and identity constructions within the discourse you are analyzing.

Step 2 of the discourse analysis with MAXQDA: Coding data

Coding data in MAXQDA plays a critical role in the analysis process. Coding involves identifying and marking specific themes, categories, or concepts within the data. This allows researchers to systematically organize and extract relevant information from the data. In MAXQDA, different types of data can be coded, such as text passages, images, videos, or audio files. Codes can be used to associate these data segments with specific content or meanings. Researchers can use codes to identify and mark certain phenomena or themes in the data, allowing for targeted access later. Coding in MAXQDA allows researchers to identify complex relationships and patterns within the data.By linking and combining codes and organizing them hierarchically, researchers can establish relationships between different elements. These connections provide new insights and help understand the relationships within the data. The coded data can be further used in MAXQDA for additional analysis. For example, complex queries or filters can be applied to examine specific aspects of the discourse in detail. By analyzing the coded data, researchers can identify patterns, trends, and significant relationships that lead to valuable insights.MAXQDA provides an intuitive and easy-to-use platform to efficiently perform the coding and analysis process. The program offers several tools and features that allow researchers to customize the coding process and tailor the analysis to their specific needs. Overall, coding data in MAXQDA is a critical step in analyzing and understanding qualitative data.

Coding data in MAXQDA allows researchers to identify and analyze specific discursive elements such as themes, arguments, or language strategies in the texts under study. To code data in MAXQDA, researchers can select relevant text passages and assign them codes that represent specific meanings or categories. These codes can be organized hierarchically to illustrate relationships between different discursive elements. In addition to coding, MAXQDA offers features such as text annotation, the ability to create memos, and options for visual data presentation at later stages. These features facilitate the organization and interpretation of coded data, enabling researchers to gain deep insights into the discourse under study and to visualize their findings. MAXQDA provides a comprehensive and efficient platform for coding and analyzing data in discourse analysis.

Step 3 of the discourse analysis with MAXQDA: Creating Codebook

A Codebook in MAXQDA defines codes for units of meaning within data. It enables structured and consistent coding, improves traceability and reproducibility, increases the efficiency of data analysis, facilitates comparisons and cross-references between codes and data, and provides flexibility and adaptability. In summary, a codebook promotes structured, consistent, and efficient data analysis, improving traceability and identification of relationships and patterns.

A Codebook is also very useful for discourse analysis in MAXQDA. Here are some reasons why:

• Structured coding of discourse features: A Codebook establishes uniform rules and definitions for coding data. This ensures that coding is structured and consistent across researchers and stages of analysis. This increases the reliability of results and facilitates the comparison and integration of data.
• Improved traceability and reproducibility: By clearly defining the codes and their use in the Codebook, the traceability of the coding process is improved. Other researchers can understand and trace the coding, increasing the reproducibility of the analysis. In addition, a Codebook facilitates effective collaboration and sharing of data and analysis among researchers.
• Identification and comparison of discourse patterns: A Codebook allows for the systematic identification and comparison of discourse patterns. This makes it possible to identify connections, patterns, and differences in the data, thus facilitating the interpretation of the results.
• Efficient data analysis: A Codebook provides a structured view of the codes used and their meanings. This allows researchers to work more efficiently by applying the codes quickly and specifically to relevant data. Using a codebook saves time and makes it easier to organize and navigate the coded data.
• Flexibility and adaptability: A Codebook in MAXQDA is flexible and customizable. Researchers can add, modify, or remove codes to meet the needs of their specific research questions. This allows for dynamic and iterative data analysis, where the Codebook can be continually updated and expanded.

In summary, a well-designed codebook in MAXQDA promotes structured, consistent, and efficient data analysis.

Step 4 of the discourse analysis with MAXQDA: Visualize data

MAXQDA offers a wide range of visualization tools to help you present your research data in an engaging and meaningful way. These include not only different types of charts, such as bar or pie charts for visualizing numerical data, but also other innovative visualization tools that help you identify and analyze complex relationships.

Code Matrix Browser

With the Code Matrix Browser , in MAXQDA, you can visually display and analyze the occurrence of codes in your data. This feature is invaluable for identifying similarities, differences, and patterns in discourse. Here are some of the ways the Code Matrix Browser can help you:

• Visualization of codings: The Code Matrix Browser displays a matrix where codes are arranged along the rows and documents along the columns. This visual representation allows you to quickly see which codes were used in which documents. This allows you to identify similarities and differences in the coding, which makes it easier to make connections.
• Pattern recognition: By analyzing codings in the Code Relations Browser, you can identify patterns in discourse. For example, you can observe which codes are particularly prevalent in certain documents. These patterns may indicate important themes, arguments, or language strategies, helping you to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the discourse.
• Comparison: With the Code Matrix Browser, you can compare how often certain codes were assigned in each document and display the corresponding information in the matrix. This allows you to analyze relationships between different elements in the discourse and to make connections between different topics or arguments.

Code Relations Browser

The Code Relations Browser , in MAXQDA allows you to visually display and analyze the connections and dependencies between the codes in your discourse. This feature is extremely valuable for understanding the interactions and hierarchy between codes. Here are some of the ways the Code Relations Browser can help you:

• Visualize code relationships: The Code Relations Browser visually displays the relationships between codes. You can see which codes are linked and how they are related to each other. These relationships can be hierarchical, associative, or several other types. This visual representation helps you better understand the structure and organization of codes within the discourse.
• Analyze interactions: The Code Relations Browser lets you analyze the interactions between codes. You can observe which codes occur frequently or how they influence each other. This can help you identify specific themes, arguments, or concepts in the discourse and examine their interrelationships. Analyzing these interactions can provide a deeper understanding of the discourse and the connections between codes.

The Code Map in MAXQDA visualizes selected codes as a map, showing the similarity of codes based on overlaps in the data material. Each code is represented by a circle, and the distance between the circles indicates their similarity. Larger circles represent more instances of coding with the code. Colors can highlight group membership, and connecting lines indicate overlap between codes, with thicker lines indicating more significant overlap.Visualizing the similarities between codes in the data provides an overview of different discursive elements. Grouping codes into clusters allows for the identification of specific discourse themes or dimensions. The connecting lines also show how codes interact and which codes frequently appear together. This allows for a detailed examination of the relationships between discursive elements, facilitating the interpretation and analysis of the discourse.

Document Map

The Document Map visualizes selected documents like a map. The positioning of the circles on the map is based on the similarity of the code assignments between the documents. Documents with similar code mappings are placed closer together, while those with different code mappings are placed further apart. Variable values from the documents can be used to determine similarity. Optionally, similar documents can be color-coded. Larger circles represent documents with more of the analyzed codes. The Document Map is a useful tool for visually grouping cases and can be used for typing or further investigation of the identified groups. The Document Map can be used in several ways in discourse analysis:

• Discourse group identification: By positioning documents on the map based on their code assignments, similar discourse groups can be identified. Documents with similar code assignments are placed closer together, indicating common discursive features.
• Recognition of discourse patterns: The visual representation of documents and their similarities on the map allows for the detection of patterns in discourse. Clusters of documents with similar codings may indicate common themes, arguments, or language patterns.
• Exploration of discourse dynamics: The use of connecting lines between codes on the map can reveal which codes overlap within documents. Thick connecting lines indicate frequent overlap and may suggest discursive relationships or connections.”
• Typification: The Document Map can serve as a basis for typology in discourse analysis. By grouping documents with similar code assignments, different discourse types can be identified and described”.

Profile Comparison Chart

The Profile Comparison Chart MAXQDA allows you to select multiple documents and compare the use of codes within those documents. This comparison allows you to identify differences or similarities in discourse between the selected documents. Below are some steps for using the Profile Comparison Chart:

• Document selection: Select the documents you want to compare. You can choose single documents or a group of documents. These documents should represent the discourse you want to analyze.
• Code selection: Select the codes you wish to compare in the selected documents. These can be specific themes, concepts or discursive elements that are of interest in the discourse.
• Create the comparison chart: Create the comparison graph in MAXQDA. The graph shows the occurrence of codes in individual paragraphs of the documents.
• Analysis of the chart: Analyze the comparison chart to identify differences or similarities in the discourse of the selected documents. Examine the assignment of codes in the paragraphs of the documents. Different patterns or variations in frequency may indicate differences in discourse, while similar patterns may indicate similarities in discourse.

Document Portrait

The Document Portrait feature in MAXQDA allows you to visually represent important features, themes, or characteristics of a document by visualizing the sequence of coding within that document. This feature allows you to identify relevant aspects of the discourse and analyze their weight in this particular document. Below are some steps for using the Document Portrait:

• Document Selection: Select the document for which you want to create a document portrait. The document selected should be representative of the discourse you are analyzing.
• Identify relevant features: Identify the codes that you want to visualize. These may be specific relevant features, themes or characteristics of the document, or other elements relevant to the discourse.
• Weighting of Features: The length of the segment is used as a weighting factor for the Document Portrait.
• Creation of the Document Portrait: Generate the Document Portrait in MAXQDA. The portrait visualizes the identified features and their weighting in the selected document. As a result, you obtain a visual representation of the sequence of coding performed within the document.
• Analysis of the Portrait: Analyze the Document Portrait to identify important features, themes, or characteristics of the document. This allows you to locate and understand relevant aspects of the discourse within a particular document.

The Codeline is a powerful tool in MAXQDA that allows you to visually represent the use of different codes within a document. By displaying the sequence of codes, you can see the flow and development of the discourse. With the Codeline, you can not only see which codes were used in specific sections of the document, but you can also track the progression of codings within a document. This allows you to identify crucial stages, turning points, or focal points in the discourse.The Codeline also allows you to analyze coded segments over time. You can examine specific codes and their occurrences or changes over time. This allows you to examine and interpret trends, patterns, or changes in the discourse more closely. The Codeline is therefore a valuable tool for considering the temporal progression and development of discourse in your analysis.By analyzing coded segments over time, you can gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics and context of the discourse, leading to more informed interpretations.

The Word Cloud is a powerful visualization tool in MAXQDA that helps you visually represent frequently occurring words or terms in the discourse. By looking at the size or weight of the words in the Word Cloud, you can quickly see which terms are particularly prevalent or significant in the discourse. By analyzing the Word Cloud, you can identify key terms in the discourse and examine their weight or frequency in relation to other terms. This allows you to identify and understand important themes, trends, or focuses in the discourse. In addition, you can use the Word Cloud to identify connections between different terms. If certain words occur frequently together or are used in similar contexts, you can identify associations or links in the discourse. The Word Cloud is thus a valuable tool for getting a quick and clear representation of the most common words or terms in the discourse. By analyzing the key terms and their weighting, you can gain important insights into the content and structure of the discourse and make a well-informed interpretation.

We offer a variety of free learning materials to help you get started with MAXQDA. Check out our Getting Started Guide to get a quick overview of MAXQDA and step-by-step instructions on setting up your software and creating your first project with your brand new QDA software. In addition, the free Literature Reviews Guide explains how to conduct a literature review with MAXQDA.

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• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on 5 May 2022 by Amy Luo . Revised on 5 December 2022.

Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real-life situations.

When you do discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs, and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political, and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies. It is also called critical discourse analysis.

Table of contents

What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication, such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers, and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts, and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analysing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

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Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasises the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g., to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words, or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analysed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analysing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyse the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

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Case study | definition, examples & methods, how to do thematic analysis | guide & examples, content analysis | a step-by-step guide with examples.

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• Brian David Hodges , associate professor, vice chair (education), and director 1 ,
• Ayelet Kuper , assistant professor 2 ,
• Scott Reeves , associate professor 3
• 1 Department of Psychiatry, Wilson Centre for Research in Education, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street, Eaton South 1-565, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 2C4
• 2 Department of Medicine, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and Wilson Centre for Research in Education, University of Toronto, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Room HG 08, Toronto, ON, Canada M4N 3M5
• 3 Department of Psychiatry, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, Centre for Faculty Development, and Wilson Centre for Research in Education, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street, Eaton South 1-565, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 2C4
• Correspondence to: B D Hodges brian.hodges{at}utoronto.ca

This articles explores how discourse analysis is useful for a wide range of research questions in health care and the health professions

Previous articles in this series discussed several methodological approaches used by qualitative researchers in the health professions. This article focuses on discourse analysis. It provides background information for those who will encounter this approach in their reading, rather than instructions for conducting such research.

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is about studying and analysing the uses of language. Because the term is used in many different ways, we have simplified approaches to discourse analysis into three clusters (table 1 ⇓ ) and illustrated how each of these approaches might be used to study a single domain: doctor-patient communication about diabetes management (table 2 ⇓ ). Regardless of approach, a vast array of data sources is available to the discourse analyst, including transcripts from interviews, focus groups, samples of conversations, published literature, media, and web based materials.

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 Three approaches to discourse analysis

 Three approaches to a specific research question: example of doctor-patient communications about diabetes management

What is formal linguistic discourse analysis?

The first approach, formal linguistic discourse analysis, involves a structured analysis of text in order to find general underlying rules of linguistic or communicative function behind the text. 4 For example, Lacson and colleagues compared human-human and machine-human dialogues in order to study the possibility of using computers to compress human conversations about patients in a dialysis unit into a form that physicians could use to make clinical decisions. 5 They transcribed phone conversations between nurses and 25 adult dialysis patients over a three month period and coded all 17 385 words by semantic type (categories of meaning) and structure (for example, sentence length, word position). They presented their work as a “first step towards an automatic analysis of spoken medical dialogue” that would allow physicians to “answer questions …

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Chapter 23: Discourse analysis

Tess Tsindos

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Describe discourse analysis.
• Understand how to conduct discourse analysis.
• Identify the strengths and limitations of discourse analysis.

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is a field of qualitative analysis that has its origins in disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology. 1 It is an interdisciplinary field that deals with ‘language’ and meaning. 2

According to Jaworski and Coupland, the purpose of discourse analysis is that it ‘offers a means of exposing or deconstructing the social practices that constitute ‘social structure’ and what we might call the conventional meaning structures of social life. It is a sort of forensic activity’. 3 ( p5 ) There are three domains of discourse analysis: the study of social interaction; the study of minds, selves and sense-making; and the study of culture and social relations. 4 ( p5 )

Discourse analysis is the study of texts such as transcribed interviews, websites, forums, books, newspapers, government documents (and many more), and the analysis of those texts to understand different accounts and the meanings behind those accounts. Qualitative researchers strive to understand the relationships between text (discourse) and social constructs. As text is analysed, the meaning behind the text is also explored, often as the ‘voices’ in the text. For example, when a participant is asked about their eating habits and they discuss their joy in eating as well as feelings of guilt from eating high-calorific foods, they may be voicing their parents’ disapproval of this eating behaviour. The relationship between text and social constructs can also be seen in alcohol advertising: an advertisement may be promoting alcohol consumption as a fun behaviour, but also cautions listeners to drink ‘responsibly’, because the advertiser is required to do so by advertising standards authorities. This inherent contradiction in the advertising is part of the meaning-making regarding alcohol consumption. This meaning-making is contextual and differs between countries, such as Australia (a high alcohol consumption culture) and Canada (a lower alcohol consumption culture). Another example of context is in the use of the word ‘just’ by an interview participant; the term can mean many things, but if the researcher is asking about job title, ‘just’ may the participant’s implication or inference that the title does not reflect an important position (e.g. ‘I’m just an editor’). In discourse analysis, texts, meanings and inferences are important.

Following is an example of media articles and two distinct discourses about violence towards women. The first media article, published by The Guardian on 15 June 2018 , 5 presents a discourse about how it is the responsibility of women to prevent men from being violent towards them. The second article about the same incident, published by The Age on 25 May 2019, 6 presents a discourse that it is the responsibility of men not to be violent towards women.

Meanings of texts are particularly important when participants use metaphors. The researcher needs to examine the implications of the metaphor, deliberate or inadvertent. For example, when the researcher asks the participant how they felt about their life and the participant replies, ‘life is a highway’, the researcher needs to look beyond what was said to understand the participant’s meaning.

As an interdisciplinary method, discourse analysis can be complex and intricate. Gee 7 provides 72 tools to assist with various types of discourse analysis, ranging from identifying what is being said and what is not being said, to examining ‘how the person is using language, as well as ways of acting, interacting, believing, valuing, dressing, and using various objects, tools, and technologies in certain sorts of environments to enact a specific socially recognizable identity and engage in one or more socially recognizable activities’. 7 ( p201 ) Gee also includes a helpful table (see Table 23.1) populated with his 7 building tasks for researchers to examine their discourses, and provides the answers. 8

Table 23.1. Seven Building Tasks and associated discourse analysis questions

How to conduct discourse analysis

Discourse analysis, as in all other qualitative methods, is used depending on the research topic and question(s) or aim(s). The following steps are recommended:

Step 1: Have a clearly defined topic and research question, because this informs the types of research materials that will be used.

Step 2: Conduct wide-ranging searches for materials that will inform the research topic.

Step 3: Determine which theory and framework will be used as the underpinning foundation for the analyses (see Section 1 chapters 1–4).

Step 4: Analyse the content of the materials. This analysis is different (but similar) to content analysis, which is a research technique to systematically classify codes and identify themes or patterns within the data. Discourse analysis is concerned with identifying themes and patterns within the texts that relate to the social contexts reflected in the research topic and within the theoretical lens chosen for analyses.

Step 5: Interpret and draw conclusions. Reflect on your work and examine how the various texts use language within the context of the research topic to answer the research question(s).

As an example, Table 23.3 includes a study on girls’ experience of competitive dancing . 9 The authors progressed through the steps as follows:

Step 1: The topic is eating disorders and young dancers. The research question is ‘ How does experience in the world of competitive dance shape the relationship that young girls have with their bodies ?’

Step 2: The author conducted wide – ranging literature searches on eating disorders, ballet dancers, body image, thinness, Western culture, dieting, media influences and many more topics.

Step 3: Feminism was the theoretical underpinning of the text ual analys i s. As described by the authors, ‘ a feminist post structural approach was chosen to provide a critical lens to explore the beliefs, values, and practices of young dancers… aimed to provide an understanding of the dominant and competing discourses present in the world of dance and discover how these discourses are constituted, perpetuated, and form ways of knowing in relation to body and body image.’ 9(p 7 )

Ste p 4: T he transcripts were analysed in 5 steps , following Aston 10 a nd presented in table 23.2 :

Table 23.2. A guide to using feminist poststructuralism informed by discourse analysis

*Note: This table is from an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits copy and redistribution of material in any medium or format, remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially provided the original work is properly cited.

Step 5: Results were first interpreted within an ‘environmental’ context (competitive culture, ideal dancer’s body, mirrors, and dance attire and costumes) , which was predominately negative due to the competitive culture. The second context was ‘parents’ , which encompassed body monitoring, joking, and parents and support. Although most of the dancers stated that their parents did not influence their relationship with their body, discourse analysis demonstrated that parents did influence them. The third context was ‘ coaches’ . Coaches had a very strong influence on participants’ body image. While the dancers believed their coaches were supportive, the discourse demonstrated that most coach es’ comments were negative. ‘Peers’ represented in the final context for analysis. Again, the dancers believed their peers were supportive ; however , discourse analysis demonstrated that many peer comments were negative. The conclusions drawn from the research were that ‘ all participants experienced negative physical, mental, and/or emotional repercussions throughout their competitive dance experience. It was also determined that environment, parents, coaches, and peers largely shaped the dancer’s relationship with body and body image in the world of dance. These influences generated and perpetuated the dominant negative body image discourse that dancers were often unable to resist, and consequently their relationship with body and body image suffered.’ 9(p p22-23 )

This is a good example of situating a topic (body image) within a context (young women dancing) underpinned by a theoretical framework that explores the dancers’ beliefs, values and practices.

Table 23.3. Discourse analysis examples

Advantages and challenges of discourse analysis

Discourse analysis can be used to analyse small and large data sets with homogenous and heterogenous samples. It can be applied to any type of data source, from interviews and focus groups to diary entries, news reports and online discussion forums. However, interpretation in discourse analysis can lead to limitations and challenges that tend to occur when discourse analysis is misapplied or done poorly. Discourse analysis can be highly flexible and is best used when anchored in a theoretical approach. Because discourse analysis involves subjective interpretation, training and support from a qualitative researcher with expertise in the method is required to ensure that the interpretation of the data is meaningful. Finally, discourse analysis can be time-consuming when analysing large volumes of texts.

Discourse analysis is a process whereby texts are examined and interpreted. It looks for the meanings ‘behind’ text in cultural and social contexts. Discourse analysis is flexible, and the researcher has scope to interpret the text(s) based on the research topic and aim(s). Having a theoretical approach assists the researcher to position the discourse in cultural and social grounding.

• Schiffrin D, Tannen D et al . , ed s . The Handbook of Discourse Analysis . Blackwell ; 2001.
• Jaworski A, Coupland N. eds. The Discourse Reader . 2nd ed. Routledge; 2006.
• Jaworski A, Coupland N. Introduction: perspectives on discourse analysis. In: Jaworski A, Coupland N, eds. The Discourse Reader . 2nd ed. Routledge; 2006.
• Wetherell M, Taylor S, Yates S. (2001) Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader . 2nd ed. Sage. 2001.
• Davey M. ‘Men need to change’: anger grows over police response to Eurydice Dixon’s murder. Guardian . June 15, 2018. Accessed April 28, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/15/men-need-to-change-anger-grows-over-police-response-to-comedians#:~:text=Melbourne
• Fowler M. ‘This is about men’s behaviour’, says top policy offer after another woman’s murder . Age . May 25, 2019. Accessed April 28, 2023. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/this-is-about-men-s-behaviour-says-top-police-officer-after-another-woman-s-murder-20190525-p51r46.html
• Gee J. How t o d o Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit .  2nd ed. Routledge; 2014.
• Gee J. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method . 3rd ed. Routledge; 2011.
• Doria N, Numer M. Dancing in a culture of disordered eating: a feminist poststructural analysis of body and body image among young girls in the world of dance. PLoS ONE . 2022;17(1): e0247651. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0247651
• Aston M. Teaching feminist poststructuralism: founding scholars still relevant today.  Creative Education . 2016;7(15):2251-2267. doi: 10.4236/ce.2016.715220
• Öhman A, Burman M, Carbin M et al . ‘The public health turn on violence against women’: analysing Swedish healthcare law, public health and gender-equality policies.  BMC Public Health . 2020;20:753. doi:10.1186/s12889-020-08766-7
• Carrasco JM, Gómez-Baceiredo B, Navas A et al. Social representation of palliative care in the Spanish printed media: a qualitative analysis. PLoS ONE . 2019;14(1):e0211106. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0211106

Qualitative Research – a practical guide for health and social care researchers and practitioners Copyright © 2023 by Tess Tsindos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Discourse Analysis Applications: With Examples

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“Discourse Analysis Applications: With Examples” provides an enlightening exploration of how Discourse Analysis (DA) is employed across diverse sectors to unearth the nuanced ways language influences society. This article dives into several practical applications of DA, showcasing its versatility in fields ranging from media studies and politics to healthcare and environmental discourse. Each section not only describes how DA is used but also links these applications to real-world impacts, such as shaping public opinion, uncovering bias in legal contexts , or enhancing communication in healthcare settings.

Readers will learn how DA helps analyze political speeches to reveal underlying ideologies, or how it decodes media representations to understand societal values. The blog also highlights how DA in healthcare leads to better patient outcomes through improved communication strategies. Additionally, the article provides examples such as the analysis of social media movements like #MeToo, which illustrates DA’s role in societal change.

By offering a broad overview yet detailing specific instances where DA has been effectively implemented, the article aims to provide readers with a clear understanding of the practical significance of studying language in context. This introduction serves as a primer for anyone interested in the transformative power of language analysis in both understanding and shaping the world around us.

1) Media Studies

2) political discourse, 3) healthcare communication, 4) education, 5) social media and online communities, 6) legal studies, 7) organizational and corporate communication, 8) environmental discourse, 9) gender studies, 10) public health and crisis communication.

• 1) Political Discourse: Obama's Speeches

2) Media Studies: The #MeToo Movement

3) healthcare communication: doctor-patient interactions, 4) education: classroom discourse, 5) legal studies: courtroom language, 6) environmental discourse: climate change communication, frequently asked questions, 1. discourse analysis applications.

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a versatile and powerful tool used across a wide range of fields and applications. By examining how language is used in various contexts, DA provides insights into the construction of meaning , social identity , and power dynamics. Below are detailed applications of Discourse Analysis in various domains:

In media studies, DA is used to analyze how news outlets, social media, films, and other media forms produce and reflect societal norms and values. Researchers might examine how media discourse constructs identities (e.g., gender, race, nationality) and propagates ideologies, or how it frames events and issues, influencing public perception and opinion.

DA is crucial in understanding political communication, including speeches, debates, policy documents, and propaganda. It can reveal how political language shapes public discourse, constructs political identities, and mobilizes or manipulates public sentiment. For instance, analyzing rhetorical strategies or the framing of issues can uncover underlying ideologies and power structures.

In healthcare, DA can be applied to patient-provider interactions, medical education , and health policy documents to improve communication and outcomes. It helps in understanding how language use affects patient engagement, consent, and decision-making. Analysis of discourse in this context can identify communication barriers and enhance the clarity and effectiveness of health messages.

DA techniques are used to examine classroom interactions, educational policies, and academic texts . This application can uncover how educational discourses influence teaching practices, learner engagement, and the construction of knowledge. It also explores issues of identity, authority, and power within educational settings.

With the rise of digital communication, DA has become essential in analyzing online interactions. It can explore how online discourse communities form and maintain social norms, how identity and authority are negotiated in digital spaces, and how online discourse influences real-world actions and beliefs.

In legal contexts, DA examines legal texts, courtroom discourse, and police-citizen interactions to reveal how legal realities are constructed through language. It can highlight issues of fairness, bias, and power in legal proceedings, contributing to more transparent and equitable legal practices.

DA is used to analyze corporate communication strategies, workplace interactions, and organizational cultures . It can reveal how corporate discourse shapes brand identity, employee relations, and consumer perceptions, offering insights for more effective communication and organizational practices.

This application involves analyzing discourse related to environmental issues, policies, and activism. DA can uncover how environmental narratives are constructed, how they reflect and shape societal values and attitudes towards the environment, and how they mobilize action or resistance.

DA in gender studies examines how discourses construct and perpetuate gender identities and relations. It can analyze the representation of gender in media, the language of gendered violence, or discourses surrounding gender rights and equality, contributing to a deeper understanding of gender issues.

During health crises, such as pandemics, DA can analyze public health messages, media coverage, and public discourse to understand how crisis communication strategies affect public behavior and attitudes towards health measures.

These applications demonstrate the breadth and depth of Discourse Analysis as a tool for understanding and influencing the complex ways in which language shapes social reality . By uncovering the nuances of language use in various contexts, DA contributes to critical insights and interventions across disciplines.

2. Case Studies & Examples

Integrating case studies or examples into an explanation of Discourse Analysis (DA) can vividly illustrate its practical applications and the depth of insights it can provide. Here are a few examples across different domains:

1) Political Discourse: Obama’s Speeches

A notable case study involves the analysis of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s speeches. Researchers have employed DA to understand how Obama used rhetorical strategies to construct a relatable and authoritative persona. Through DA, scholars examined how he navigated racial identity, national unity, and political ideology , often using inclusive language and storytelling to connect with diverse audiences. This analysis highlights the power of political discourse in shaping public perception and national identity.

The #MeToo movement provides a rich case for DA within media studies, particularly in examining how social media discourse can drive social change. Analysis of #MeToo-related content on platforms like Twitter and Facebook revealed how survivors used narrative to share experiences, creating a powerful discourse that challenged societal norms around sexual harassment and assault. DA in this context uncovers the mechanisms through which digital platforms can amplify marginalized voices and mobilize collective action.

In healthcare, DA has been applied to study the discourse between doctors and patients, particularly in sensitive areas such as end-of-life care discussions. One case study involved analyzing conversations in oncology settings to understand how physicians communicate diagnoses and treatment options. The findings emphasized the need for clear, compassionate communication practices that acknowledge patient autonomy and emotional well-being, influencing training programs for healthcare professionals.

DA has been used to examine classroom interactions and their impact on learning environments. One example involved analyzing teacher-student dialogue in science classrooms to identify how questions were used to stimulate critical thinking and engagement. This study revealed patterns in how teachers’ questioning techniques either encouraged or stifled student participation and inquiry, leading to recommendations for pedagogical strategies that foster a more interactive and inclusive learning atmosphere.

Courtroom discourse analysis provides insights into the language used in legal settings and its implications for justice and fairness. A notable case involved analyzing the language used by prosecutors and defense attorneys in jury trials to identify how each party constructs narratives to persuade the jury. The study highlighted the strategic use of language to frame evidence, character judgments, and emotional appeals, underscoring the performative aspects of legal discourse and its potential impact on trial outcomes.

Research on climate change communication has utilized DA to explore how environmental issues are discussed in political, media, and scientific discourses. One case study analyzed speeches by world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conferences, revealing how different nations frame the issue of climate change in terms of responsibility, urgency, and action. This analysis helps understand the political and ideological underpinnings of environmental policies and the role of discourse in shaping global environmental agendas.

Discourse Analysis (DA) stands as a critical lens through which the intricate web of language, power, and social structure is unraveled across diverse fields. By dissecting language use in contexts ranging from media and politics to healthcare and education, DA illuminates the nuanced ways in which discourse shapes our understanding of the world, constructs social identities, and navigates power dynamics. The application of DA across various domains not only enriches our comprehension of discourse’s role in societal phenomena but also empowers interventions and policy-making aimed at fostering more equitable and understanding societies.

The detailed case studies, ranging from the analysis of Barack Obama’s speeches to the exploration of the #MeToo movement’s impact through social media, underscore DA’s versatility and its potent capability to reveal underlying societal norms and power structures. These examples vividly illustrate DA’s ability to provide meaningful insights into the construction of narratives and identities, showcasing its paramount importance in deciphering the complex language mechanisms that influence public perception and behavior.

Moreover, the exploration of DA in contexts such as healthcare communication, legal studies, and environmental discourse emphasizes the practical implications of understanding discourse. By revealing how language can both empower and marginalize, DA serves as a foundational tool in advocating for change, enhancing communication strategies, and understanding the multifaceted nature of human interaction .

In conclusion, Discourse Analysis offers a profound framework for examining the omnipresent influence of language in shaping human experience and societal structures . Its applications across a myriad of fields underscore the universal relevance of discourse in our daily lives and institutional frameworks. As we continue to navigate a world increasingly dominated by diverse forms of communication, the insights provided by DA remain indispensable in our quest to foster a more inclusive, understanding, and reflective society. Through the lens of DA, we are better equipped to recognize the power of language in constructing our realities and are thus called to engage with it more critically and conscientiously.

Unlike traditional linguistic analysis, which often focuses on the structure and grammar of language, Discourse Analysis examines language use in social contexts to understand how it shapes and is shaped by cultural, social, and political dynamics. DA explores the meaning beyond the text, considering the implications of discourse on identity, power relations , and societal norms.

Yes, Discourse Analysis can extend to non-verbal communication through Multimodal Discourse Analysis . This approach analyzes how various modes of communication (e.g., gestures, images, layout) work together with verbal language to produce meaning and affect audience interpretation and response.

Technology, particularly advanced software and algorithms, plays a crucial role in modern DA by enabling the analysis of large datasets (corpora) through Corpus Linguistics . It facilitates the identification of patterns, trends, and anomalies in discourse across vast amounts of text, making DA more efficient and comprehensive.

DA can significantly influence policy making by revealing how language and discourse shape public understanding and attitudes towards policy issues. By unpacking the discourse surrounding policy debates, DA can help policymakers communicate more effectively, address public concerns, and anticipate the societal impact of policy decisions.

DA contributes to social change by exposing and critiquing the power dynamics and ideologies embedded in discourse. By analyzing and challenging the discourse that perpetuates inequality or injustice, DA empowers advocacy and reform efforts aimed at creating a more equitable society.

DA is pivotal in combating misinformation by analyzing the strategies used to spread false information and understanding how it gains traction within communities. By dissecting the discourse of misinformation, researchers can develop strategies to counteract it and promote accurate information.

Ethical considerations in DA include ensuring the privacy and consent of individuals whose communication is analyzed, especially in online and digital contexts. Researchers must also navigate the potential for bias and ensure their analyses do not harm the communities or individuals studied.

Limitations of DA include its inherent subjectivity in interpreting texts and the potential for researcher bias. Additionally, DA’s focus on language and discourse means it may overlook non-discursive factors influencing social phenomena.

Learning DA involves a multidisciplinary approach, including studying linguistics, sociology , and anthropology . Engaging with academic literature, taking coursework or workshops focused on DA, and practicing analysis with diverse texts are effective ways to build skills in DA.

As global communication becomes more digital and interconnected, DA is evolving to address new forms of discourse, such as digital communication patterns, cross-cultural interactions, and the impact of social media on public discourse. Researchers are continually developing new methodologies to analyze these changing landscapes of communication.

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• 10 Research Question Examples to Guide Your Research Project

10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project

Published on October 30, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on October 19, 2023.

The research question is one of the most important parts of your research paper , thesis or dissertation . It’s important to spend some time assessing and refining your question before you get started.

The exact form of your question will depend on a few things, such as the length of your project, the type of research you’re conducting, the topic , and the research problem . However, all research questions should be focused, specific, and relevant to a timely social or scholarly issue.

Once you’ve read our guide on how to write a research question , you can use these examples to craft your own.

Note that the design of your research question can depend on what method you are pursuing. Here are a few options for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical research questions.

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Discourse Analysis Research Methodology – Meaning, Uses and Procedure

Published 16 October, 2023

Discourse analysis is a research methodology that involves the study of linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of human communication, including verbal and written texts. This type of analysis can be done on any kind of written or spoken communication, but researchers typically use it when studying conversations and other interactions between people. This blog post will explain how to conduct a discourse analysis by explaining the steps required for this process.

What is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse analysis in research is roughly defined as the linguistic study of texts. It examines not only the wording and grammar but also how an author’s cultural identity, background knowledge, and purposes shape written messages.

It is basically a qualitative research technique which mainly utilizes in the field of humanities and social science. Material that researchers use for performing discourse analysis includes books, newspapers, etc. You can perform discourse analysis for developing an in-depth understanding of various aspects of communication. Discourse analysis mainly emphasizes the contextual meaning of language . Discourse analysis is basically an analytical procedure that mainly involves criticizing and deconstructions language that the researcher utilizes in a social context .

Discourse analysis is basically an analytical technique that researcher utilities for analyzing language. You can also utilize it for identifying the way people use language. The main objective of discourse analysis is to develop perception. It also intends to classify the meaning, networks, and procedure. In simple words, the main objective of discourse analysis is to categorize the data .  Another objective is to help in the extraction of meaningful information from it. This type of analysis mainly emphasizes negotiation, change, and production of meaning.

For example, suppose researchers conduct medical research for determining whether a misunderstanding has taken place between doctors and patients or not. The researcher has organized interviews for gathering information about the experience and feelings of women in relation to the diagnosis of breast cancer.

While performing discourse analysis in research you need to mainly emphasize on

• Objective and impact of different kinds of languages.
• Code of conduct in specific cultures and principles in the context of communication.
• The way believes ideas and opinions are communicated
• The way people use language in relation to historical, political, and social contexts.

Uses of discourse analysis

• You can perform discourse analysis for developing an understanding of the functions of language.
• It can be useful in terms of analyzing the way meaning is generated in various social contexts.
• By performing the discourse analysis you can gain knowledge about the different social groups. You will be able to develop an understanding of the way they communicate.
• Discourse is basically one of the types of research techniques that you can use for analyzing a large volume of material.
• You can also apply it to smaller samples all things depend on the aims, objectives, and time period of investigation.

Sources which you can analyze at the different communication level

Procedure of conducting discourse analysis

There are different phases involved in discourse analysis, these are:

Step 1. Defining a research question and selecting content for analysis

Before beginning to perform discourse analysis in research you need to identify the research questions for which you want to get answers. After that, you need to define the same. This means that after formulating good research questions you need to choose different materials that could be helpful in getting answers.

For example, Suppose, you perform research for developing the understanding of the way the particular transformation of dictatorship to democracy that influences the businesses. You for collecting the information about the same can emphasize on the identification of mission. In addition to this, you will also need to analyze the marketing material such as a brochure, advertisement of the five largest organizations after the transformation in a management system.

Step 2. Collection of facts and hypotheses on the context

it is a phase where you need to gather detailed information about the sources of content. Other details that you will need to gather about content include the name of the author, information about publication and publisher, etc. You can do the construction of a theoretical framework and write a literature review can as this strategy will help you in supporting your analysis.

For example , you are performing an investigation on the history and politics of the nation. You are collecting information about history and politics meantime you are conducting research on business. You are also performing a study on analyzing the relationship between government and businesses.

Step 3. Analysis of content for designing themes

It is the stage in discourse analysis where you need to closely analyze the various components and aspects of material like every word, sentence, paragraph structure in a research paper . After analyzing the material closely you need to relate them with the themes or research questions.

For example, using the above example where the research on history and politics in the country has been performed. At this phase, if you are using the newspaper as material then you have to closely analyze each sentence, text, and opinion of people about the topic.

Step 4. Reviewing outcome and Making a conclusion

At this phase of discourse analysis in research, you need to express your opinion about the Research findings of the investigation. It is the strategy that will help you in analyzing the meaning and functions of language. It is a stage you need to review the analysis which you have to perform in terms of a wide context.

For example, Research on the history and politics of the nation, results reveals that the article which was published before the transformation of the management system states that there is a need for change. Whereas, it has been found by material published after changes in the regime that there is a need for transformation for providing high value to customers.

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Introducing Discourse Analysis for Qualitative Research

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. This is how discourse analysis (DA) can be used to examine qualitative data.

Daniel Turner

Qualitative research often focuses on what people say: be that in interviews , focus-groups , diaries , social media or documents . 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. Essentially this is the how discourse analysis (DA) can be used to examine qualitative data. Discourse is the complete system by which people communicate, it’s the widest interpretation of what we call ‘language’. It includes both written, verbal and non-verbal communication, as well as the wider social concepts that underpin what language means, and how it changes. For example, it can be revealing to look at how some people use a particular word, or terms from a particular local dialect. This can show their upbringing and life history, or influences from other people and workplace culture. 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. But language is also a dynamic part of culture, and the meanings behind terms change over time. 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. We will look at all these as separate types of discourse analysis. But first it’s important to understand why language is so important; it is much more than just a method of communication.

“Language allows us to do things. It allows us to engage in actions and activities. 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. It allows us to take on different socially significant identities. We can speak as experts—as doctors, lawyers, anime aficionados, or carpenters—or as ‘everyday people’. To take on any identity at a given time and place we have to ‘talk the talk’…”         - Gee 2011

Language is more than a neutral way of communicating, it’s deeply connected with actions and personal identity, and can even shape the way we think about and understand the world. Who we are, what we do, and our beliefs are all shaped by the language we use. This makes it a very rich avenue for analysis.

Types of discourse analysis 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. Hodges et al. (2008) identify 3 meta-types, broadly going from more face-value to conceptual analysis:      • Formal linguistic (basically looking at words/phrases, grammar or semantics)      • Empirical (social practice constructed through text)              • Critical (language constructing and limiting thought)

Tannen et al., 2015 categorise three similar broad types of analysis, again becoming increasingly socially conceptual:

• language use

• anything beyond the sentence

• a broader range of social practice that includes non-linguistic and non-specific instances of language

However Gee (2011) only recognises two main categories, essentially those that look at the use of words, and ‘critical discourse analysis’: like the latter of both groupings above, this is analysis of how language is situated in cultural and contextual power dynamics. But before we get there, let’s start with an example of some more obvious linguistic level discourse analysis.

Example Imagine the following scenario from your favourite fictional medical drama. A patient is wheeled into the ER/casualty unit, conscious but suffering from burns. The doctor attending says three things:

To Patient: “We’re just going to give you a little injection to help with the pain.”

To Nurse: “10cc’s of sodium pentothal, stat!”

To Surgeon: “We’ve got severe second-degree chemical burns, GA administered”

In this situation, the doctor has said essentially the same thing 3 times, but each time using a different response for each recipient. Firstly, when talking to the patient, the doctor doesn’t use any medical terminology, and uses calming and minimising language to comfort the patient. This is a classic type of discourse we are familiar with from medical TV dramas, the ‘good bed-side manner’.

To the nurse, the doctor has a different tone, more commanding and even condescending. It’s a barked command, finished with the term ‘stat!’ - a commonly used medial slang word (actually from the Latin word ‘statum’ meaning immediately, that’s your linguistic analysis!). This is interesting, because it’s not a term you’d hear used in other professional places like a busy kitchen. It shows there is a specific discourse for the setting (a hospital) and for different people in the setting. The ‘10cc of sodium pentothal’ is a commonly used anaesthetic: the same ‘something to help with the pain’ but now with a (trademarked) pharmacological name and dose.

Finally, to the surgeon the same prescription is described by the doctor as an abbreviation (GA for General Anaesthetic). Between senior health professionals, abbreviations might be used more often, in this case actually hiding the specific drug given, perhaps on the basis that the surgeon doesn’t need to know. It could also imply that since only that basic first step has been made, there has been little assessment or intervention so far, telling to an experienced ear what stage of the proceedings they are walking in on. The use of the term ‘we’ might imply the doctor and surgeon are on the same level, as part of the team, a term not used when addressing the nurse.

Even in this small example, there are a lot of different aspects of discourse to unpack. It is very contextually dependent, none of the phrases or manners are likely to be adopted by the doctor in the supermarket or at home. This shows how the identity and performativity of the doctor is connected to their job (and shaped by it, and contextual norms). It also shows differences in discourse between different actors, and power dynamics which are expressed and created through discursive norms.

At a very basic level, we could probably do an interesting study on TV shows and the use of the term ‘stat!’. We could look at how often the term was used, how often it was used by doctors to nurses (often) and by nurses to doctors (rarely). This would probably be more like a basic linguistic analysis, possibly even quantitative. 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. If someone says ‘now please’ or ‘as soon as you can’ it has a very different meaning and power dynamic, so we are not interested in synonyms here. However, we probably still want to trawl through the whole text to look at different phrases that are used, and why ‘stat!’ was not the command in all situations. This would be close to the ‘formal linguistic’ approach listed above.

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 ). Both of these papers are described as ‘critical’ discourse analysis. However, this term is used in many different ways.

Critical discourse analysis is probably the most often cited, but often used in the most literal sense – that it looks at discourse critically, and takes a comparative and critical analytic stance. It’s another term like ‘grounded theory’ that is used as a catch-all for many different nuanced approaches. But there is another ‘level’ of critical discourse analysis, influenced by Foucault (1972, 1980) and others, that goes beyond reasons for use and local context, to examine how thought processes in society influenced by the control of language and meanings.

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)

Language and discourse are not absolute. 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. Gee uses the term ‘deconstruction’ in the Derridian sense of the word, advocating for the critical examining and dismantling of unquestioned assumptions about what words mean and where they come from.

But ‘deep’ critical discourse analysis also draws heavily from Foucault and an examination of how language is a result of power dynamics, and that the discourse of society heavily regulates what words are understood to mean, as well as who can use them. It also implies that because of these systems of control, discourse is used to actually change and reshape thought and expression. But the key jump is to understand and explain that “what we take to be the truth about the world importantly depends on the social relationships of which we are a part” (Gergen 2015). This is social construction, and a key part of the philosophy behind much critical discourse analysis.

Think of the use of the term ‘freedom’ in mainstream and political discourse in the United States. It is one of the most powerful words used by politicians, and has been for centuries (eg Chanley and Chanley 2015 ) However, it’s use and meaning have changed over time, and what different people from different parts of the political spectrum understand to be enshrined under this concept can be radically different, and even exclusionary. Those in powerful political and media positions are able to change the rhetoric around words like freedom, and sub-terms like ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of religion’ are both being shifted in public discourse, even on a daily basis, and taking our own internal concepts and ideas with them. It may be that there has never been an age when so much power to manipulate discourse is concentrated in so few places, and able to shift it so rapidly.

Doing Discourse

So do we ‘do’ discourse analysis? How can we start examining complex qualitative data from many voices from a point of view of discourse? Like so many qualitative analytical techniques , researchers will usually adopt a blend of approaches: doing some elements of linguistic analysis, as well as critical discourse analysis for some parts or research questions. They may also draw on narrative and thematic analysis . But discourse analysis is often comparative, it lends itself to differences in the use of language between individuals, professionals and contexts.

From a practical point of view, it can be started by a close reading of key words and terms, especially if it is not clear from the outset what the important and illustrative ones are going to be. For building a complete picture of discourse, a line-by-line approach can be adopted, but it’s also useful to use ‘codes’ or ‘themes’ to tag every use of some terms, or just significant ones. A qualitative software tool like Quirkos can help you do this.

For critical discourse analysis, examination of primary data is rarely enough – it needs to be deeply contextualised within the wider societal or environmental norms that govern a particular subset of discourse. So policy and document analysis are often entwined and can be analysed in the same project. From here, it’s difficult to describe a single technique further, as it will greatly vary by type of source. 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.

The textbooks below are all classic works on discourse analysis, each a rabbit hole in itself to digest (especially the new edition of Gergen (2015) which goes much wider into social construction). However, Hodges et al. (2008) is a nice short, practical overview to start your journey.

If you are looking for a tool to help your qualitative discourse analysis, why not give Quirkos a try? It was designed by qualitative researchers to be the software they wanted to use, and is flexible enough for a whole number of analytical approaches, including discourse analysis. Download a free trial , or read more about it here .

Gee, J., P., 2011. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis . Routledge, London.

Gergen, K. J., 2015, An invitation to Social Construction . Sage, London.

Hodges, B. D., Kuper, A., Reeves, S. 2008. Discourse Analysis. BMJ , a879.

Johnstone, B., 2017. Discourse Analysis . Wiley, London.

Paltridge, B., 2012. Discourse Analysis: An Introduction . Bloomsbury.

Tannen, D., Hamilton, H., Schiffrin, D. 2015. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis . Wiley, Chichester.

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Discourse Analysis

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Discourse Analysis: The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How They Answer Them is the first introductory text organized around the kinds of questions discourse analysts ask and how they are systematically addressed by analysts of different empirical persuasions, thereby cultivating a principled understanding of the interdisciplinary field of discourse analysis. The text promotes synthesis, integration, and a multidimensional understanding of the core issues that preoccupy discourse analysts. (1) How is discourse structured? (2) How are social actions accomplished in discourse? (3) How are identities negotiated in discourse? (4) How are ideologies constructed in discourse? The answer to each question is illustrated with transcripts and analyses of actual discourse as exemplified in key studies in the field. With a range of other features such as boxed definitions, study questions, and analytical tasks, this guide to the complex world of discourse is an ideal resource for courses on discourse analysis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part i | 26  pages, introduction, chapter 1 | 24  pages, overview of discourse analysis, part ii | 47  pages, discourse and structure, chapter 2 | 26  pages, classics in discourse and structure, chapter 3 | 19  pages, empirical endeavors in discourse and structure, part iii | 51  pages, discourse and social action, chapter 4 | 21  pages, classics in discourse and social action, chapter 5 | 28  pages, empirical endeavors in discourse and social action, part iv | 51  pages, discourse and identity, chapter 6 | 27  pages, classics in discourse and identity, chapter 7 | 22  pages, empirical endeavors in discourse and identity, part v | 43  pages, discourse and ideology, chapter 8 | 20  pages, classics in discourse and ideology, chapter 9 | 21  pages, empirical endeavors in discourse and ideology.

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42 Questions in Discourse Analysis

• Gee, J. P. (2011). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (3rd ed., p. 224). New York, NY: Routledge.

Gee lists 42 questions that a researcher can ask when conducting analysis on a given text or set of texts (p. 121). I will put them into a simple table.

In the table, each row represents what he calls a tool of inquiry . The columns represent the building tasks . To understand how to ask the questions, first one must understand the terminology:

Tools of inquiry

Gee refers to tools of inquiry as thinking devices.

Situated meanings – may also be referred to as utterance-token meanings (p. 63). Form = “morphemes, words, phrases, or other syntactic structures” (p. 64). Function = what the utterance is intended to say or cause. If form and function are not in balance, then we might question what is happening. “Situated meanings arise because particular language forms take on specific or situated meanings in specific different contexts of use” (p. 65). Gee notes that analysis is complex because context is always changing. But, we can view an utterance from the viewpoint of different contexts and potentially gain insights into the meaning of the interaction (p. 68).

Social languages – “different styles of varieties of language for different purposes” or different social situations (p. 28). Social languages can have their own “distinctive grammars” (p. 50). They help people recognize and create their social contexts.

Figured worlds – typical, often taken-for-granted, stories or simplified pictures of situations with “typical participants, activities, forms of language, and objects and environments” (p. 71). Holland (1998) defines them as “socially constructed realm[s] of interpretation” (cited in Gee, 2001, p. 71). They are not static. Figured worlds “mediate between the ‘micro’ (small) level of interaction and the ‘macro’ (large) level of institutions” (p. 76). People can use figured worlds to construct simulations of situations to help them understand or act in the given situation(s). People also use figured worlds to evaluate appropriateness of social activity in the world (p. 90). They can be nested, incomplete, inconsistent, and changing. (An examination of figured worlds can help to uncover taken-for-granted assumptions that guide social behaviours—review previous blog posting on Ian Hacking’s book , The social construction of what?”)

Intertextuality – the act of referring to or quoting texts outside of one’s immediate discourse. It is a “sort of cross-reference to another text or type of text” (p. 29). Words may be borrowed or switched from one social language and used in another (p. 58).

Discourses – linguistic and non-linguistic elements that combine into “characteristic ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, and believing” (p. 28). They combine to produce a “socially recognizable identity” (p. 29). [Note: big “D” discourse.] On page35, Gee emphasizes the importance of recognizability. Discourses do not necessarily have clear boundaries; they can overlap, split, meld, die, mutate, etc. (p. 38).

Conversations – Gee uses this word with a big “C” to refer to “all the talk and writing that has gone on in a specific social group or in society at large around a major theme, debate, or motif” (p. 29). He adds later, “They are the products of historical disputes between and among different Discourses” (p. 56).

Building Tasks

For each building task, Gee suggests that a researcher can ask the following questions:

Given what the speaker has said or the writer has written, and how it has been said or written, what [ things, people, practices, identity(s), relationships, connections, disconnections, sign systems, languages, social languages, ways of knowing ] in this context are relevant and significant and in what ways are they significant? How is the speaker or writer trying to [ give significance to things, enact things, depict things, recruit things, use things, connect things, disconnect things, privilege things, disprivilege things ]?

Note: From my perspective, the building tasks of identity, relationships, and connections can be very difficult to separate. In particular, I see identity as highly integrated with relationships.

Questions from combining the tools of inquiry with the building task

Here is how Gee phrases the questions from the table of 42:

Significance : “How are situated meanings, social languages, figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations being used to build relevance or significance for things and people?” (p. 121).

He asks the same question for each building task.

So, my question is what elements of this do I take with me when I do my phenomenographic study? It is definitely helpful in expanding the way I will read the interview transcripts. Gee’s book is also helpful for me in developing my transcription protocols. Now onto Wetherell et. al.

5 Responses to “42 Questions in Discourse Analysis”

I am an MA student in Rhet/Comp at CSU Sacramento. I would like to adapt your discourse analysis table for my case study research. Please contact me at the email below. Thanks!

Hi, I Rifa Anjum from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, want to use your table for my research in discourse analysis. Pleases contact me on the email ID given below,

Hi Rifa, I’m sorry that I didn’t reply. I stopped blogging for a while. Yes, feel free. M

Pretty! This was an incredibly wonderful post. Many thanks for providing this info.

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This article will introduce the concept of discourse analysis, discuss when and why we use discourse analysis, describe the different types of discourse analysis, and provide step-by-step instructions on conducting discourse analysis with an example.

Discourse analysis meaning

Discourse analysis (sometimes named discourse studies) is a qualitative research method that involves an in-depth examination of any written, spoken, non-verbal, and visual language in context .

Discourse analysts are interested in how language can impart meaning. This could be vocabulary, use of grammar, gestures, facial expressions, imagery, language techniques, and many more. They analyse whole chunks (rather than individual utterances) of both planned and spontaneous written, spoken, and visual language.

An essential part of discourse analysis is examining language use within its social context . This means the societal norms, political climate, time, place, intended audience, and the speaker's socio-cultural background must all be considered as they can play a role in the meaning of language and how it's interpreted.

Discourse analysis (DA) is a varied and diverse research method used across multiple disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, media studies, history, and more.

Why conduct discourse analysis?

We analyse discourse to understand the world better and how language is used in real life. By examining the social use of language, we can appreciate its multiple functions, such as creating meaning and maintaining certain social norms and common knowledge.

A discourse analyst may examine the written language and images used on the front page of a newspaper to see what narrative it might be trying to portray and why. To understand this, they would have to consider the owner of the newspaper, the intended audience, and the current political climate and world events.

When to use discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is the perfect method for looking at the relationship between language and broader social issues, such as language and power , language and gender , language and inequality, and language in the media.

We can also use discourse analysis to see how people interact with each other in different situations and the impact language can have on society and vice versa.

Common examples of discourse we can conduct discourse analysis on are;

Conversations

Song lyrics

These are just a few examples - you can really conduct discourse analysis on anything!

Discourse analysis: what's analysed

There are no guidelines on what aspects of language you should analyse when conducting DA. How you undertake your analysis will depend on your research question and the purpose of your study. However, here is a list of language features that are commonly analysed as they can impart meaning.

Vocabular y - e.g. word choice, jargon , special lexicon.

Grammar - e.g. type of sentences, grammatical voice , use of affixes.

Punctuation - e.g. use of exclamation marks, capital letters etc.

Genre - Is it a newspaper, song, novel, etc.

Non-verbals - e.g. facial expressions, body language, pauses.

Paralinguistic features - e.g. tone, pitch, intonation .

Pragmatics - what are the extended or hidden meanings?

Grice's conversational maxims - are useful for reviewing power relations in spoken discourse.

Images and colour - how do they add to the meaning of the discourse?

Relationship between the discourse and the wider social context

Types of discourse analysis

The two main types of discourse analysis are language-in-use analysis and socio-political analysis.

Let's take a look at each of these in more detail.

Language-in-use discourse analysis

Language-in-use discourse analysis focuses more on the technical details of language, such as grammar, syntax (the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses), phonetics , phonology , and prosody . A language-in-use approach to DA involves a highly descriptive and in-depth examination of linguistic properties.

A discourse analyst may examine the speech patterns of teenagers to see when they use contractions (shortened word forms), double negatives (e.g. I ain't got no time ), neologisms (a newly created word) etc. In this case , the researcher is interested in the minor technicalities of the language.

Socio-political discourse analysis

This approach is less concerned with the technical details of language, and more focused on the impact language can have on society and vice versa. Socio-political discourse analysis looks at the relationship between language and society, such as language and power .

The most common socio-political discourse analysis approach is critical discourse analysis.

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is primarily concerned with language's role in constructing ideology and power. The approach views language as a form of social practice and aims to investigate the ideologies and power dynamics hidden within discourse.

Critical discourse analysis can also be used to critically examine language's role in creating and maintaining social inequality.

Work by the researcher and analyst Norman Fairclough has been highly influential and pioneering in the development of critical discourse analysis as a research method.

The main aims and principles of CDA include;

To see how language can create and maintain ideologies.

To uncover power structures.

To understand how power can be maintained and abused through language.

To encourage people to question what they are being told and why.

To give a voice back to historically marginalised or oppressed people.

Consider how gender, ethnicity, race, and culture are represented and constructed in discourse.

Recognising the marginalised people in society and who the most powerful are.

According to Fairclough (1984), critical discourse analysis can typically be split into two disciplines: 1

Power in discourse - the lexicon, strategies, and language structures used to create power.

Power behind discourse - The sociological and ideological reasons behind who is asserting power over others and why.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is predominantly used for multimodal discourse (usually printed communication mediums containing words, images, graphics, colours, etc.).

When conducting semiotic analysis, we take a medium of communication (e.g., a website, poster, textbook, or advertisement) and interpret the denotative (literal) and connotative (implied) meaning of the different types of discourse working together in context.

Semiotic analysis recognises that written and spoken language isn't the only part of discourse that can carry meaning, and it's important to consider how things such as imagery can significantly impact how we interpret things.

A poster with the words' knife crime kills' next to a black man may make the audience associate knife crime with black men. We would then have to question whether this was the author's intention and if so why.

Discourse analysis methodology

Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary research method (i.e. used across many subjects); therefore, research methods will vary depending on the subject, purpose of the study, and research question .

There is no right or wrong way to conduct discourse analysis - which is good news as it's difficult to get it wrong. However, this doesn't help when the time comes to conduct your analysis, and you don't know where to start!

With this in mind, we've compiled a useful 'tool kit' based on Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional model to help you get started. 2

Fairclough's model proposes discourse be analysed in three stages:

Description - analysis of the text itself, including grammar, syntax, lexicon, phonological features, literary devices (e.g. rhetorical questions), and images.

Interpretation - how discourse is produced and distributed and then consumed by the reader/listener, i.e. who is the author and the audience.

Explanation - viewing the discourse as a social practice and placing it in the context of wider society.

When we view discourse as a social practice, we consider it as something we perform or 'do', typically within a community. The philosopher Foucault stated that discourse as a social practice is often used to control or repress people by legitimising some practices and disqualifying others.

When conducting discourse analysis, you should also ask yourself the following questions;

Who wrote this text, and who is it intended for?

What narrative is being promoted?

Who benefits from this text? Who is marginalised by it?

Is the evidence credible?

What ideas are normalised by this discourse, and what are disqualified?

How do the images, colours, text, etc., work together if it is a multimodal text?

Discourse analysis example

For this example, we will conduct a discourse analysis on song lyrics using Fairclough's three-dimensional model. The chosen song is 'British Bombs' by Declan Mckenna (2019).

'Great snakes are we moving already

Good gravy did you say it cost a penny or two

Well talking bout the bad starts

My baby brother has already got a gas mask

It's a good old-fashioned landslide

Killing with your hands tied

In the homemade rope

Set sail babe we read it in the mail - no hope now

Great way to fool me again hun

Great acting, it's good what you tell em

Great Britain won't stand for felons

Great British bombs in the Yemen'

We have decided to undertake a socio-political analysis due to the genre of the discourse (a song) and the evident political influence behind the lyrics.

1. Description (analysis of the language itself)

This is a pop/rock song with somewhat emotive language, which can be seen in thought-provoking words and phrases, such as ' My baby brother has already got a gas mask' and ' Killing with your hands tied'. Repetition of the word great and alliteration of the letter B have been used to draw connections between ' Great Britain ' and ' Great British bombs' .

The terms ' Great snakes' and ' Good gravy' were common phrases in 1920-30s Britain. Mckenna may be trying to allude to British attitudes and society during the World War era, which are often described as being ignorant and overly patriotic.

2. Interpretation (the author and the audience and their potential interpretation)

The song was written by a young British musician and will likely be listened to by predominantly young British people. Mckenna may be using his music to draw his audience's attention to the use of British bombs in Yemen.

The lyrics ' Set sail babe we read it in the mail - no hope now' may be criticising the British newspaper The Daily Mail , which has often been accused of presenting a biased view of British politics. In doing this, he may influence listeners to consider where they get their news.

Mckenna uses slang associated with younger generations, such as ' hun' in the line ' Great way to fool me again, hun'. Using recognisable language may engage his audience and potentially encourage them to think more about politics.

3. Explanation (placing discourse into wider societal context)

The line ' Great British bombs in the Yemen' is likely referring to the UK's sale of British-produced bombs to Saudi Arabia, which they have dropped on civilians in Yemen since 2015. 3

Yemen is a country in the Persian Gulf that borders Saudi Arabia and Oman.

By placing the lyrics into a socio-political context, we can interpret that McKenna finds the use of British bombs hypocritical, which is arguably highlighted in the following lyrics, ' Great Britain won't stand for felons. Great British bombs in the Yemen.'

Discourse Analysis - Key Takeaways

• Discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that involves an in-depth examination of any written, spoken, non-verbal, and visual language in context .

We analyse discourse to understand how language is used in real life and how it can be used to create and maintain social norms and common knowledge.

When conducting discourse analysis some of the things we should consider are; vocabulary, grammar, tone, genre, imagery, pragmatics , and the discourse's relationship to society.

We can use discourse analysis on novels, speeches, adverts, lyrics, newspapers, and more.

The two main types of discourse analysis are language-in-use analysis and socio-political analysis. The most common socio-political analysis is critical discourse analysis.

• N. Fairclough. Language and Power. 1984.
• N. Fairclough. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. 1995.
• BBC News. Yemen: UK to resume Saudi arms sales after humanitarian review. 2020.

Flashcards in Discourse Analysis 15

Qualitative 

They can help reveal who holds the power in a conversation. For example, who is deciding the topic of the conversation.

Description

Interpretation 

Explanation 

Norman Fairclough

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Frequently Asked Questions about Discourse Analysis

What are the advantages of discourse analysis?

Some of the advantages of discourse analysis include gaining a better understanding of the role of language, tracking language changes, revealing hidden ideologies and power structures hidden within language, understanding how society can affect language and vice versa, and more. 

What is the difference between content and discourse analysis?

Content analysis is a systematic and typically quantitative research method that codes and sorts data from texts. It is less subjective than discourse analysis and relies less on the researchers' interpretations. 

What is the main focus of discourse analysis?

The main focus of discourse analysis is gaining a deeper understanding of how and why language is used to part meaning within a societal context. 

What are the elements of discourse analysis?

Elements to analyse when conducting discourse analysis include; vocabulary, grammar, genre, punctuation, paralinguistic features (tone, pitch, accent, etc.), body language, pragmatics, imagery, and the language's relationship to the wider society.

How can discourse analysis be helpful in English language teaching?

Language teachers conduct discourse analysis on the interactions happening in their classrooms to see when and why good and bad language use takes place.

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Setting up a Discourse Analysis

Tips and tricks on how to create a professional discourse analysis project.

You research politics and are interested in political communication? Then chances are your most common source material is the text, and rightly so. 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.

Yet exploring politics through texts is by no means easy. Conducting a professional analysis requires not only access to the right texts, but also time and possibly other resources. This can lead even experienced academics to cut corners. One understandable temptation might be to limit oneself to reading political texts, to summarize them for others, and to then offer a personal interpretation. This may be a legitimate way to produce a review of the relevant sources, but is it an actual analysis ? I believe that an analysis has to be more systematic than this. More importantly, I think that good, confident research should be based on evidence and should be  transparent , so that others can check the evidence.

In a previous post, I gave an introduction to the theory of discourse . In this post, I turn to the practical question of how to set up a discourse analysis. 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. Along the way, I will introduce you to a couple of analytical concepts and approaches that I find helpful.

Finding the right research question

Like with any type of research, a good discourse analysis starts with the right question. Before you pick your sources, and decide what tools to use on them, ask yourself: what is my concern?  What motivates you to conduct this particular research, and what do you hope to achieve? For instance, are you trying to find out what the position of a particular government is on a specific topic? Do you want to explore how specific political actors made sense of a crisis event? Maybe you want to know what arguments informed a major political decision, or you want to see how a politician manipulated a debate. All of these are legitimate concerns that could stand at the beginning of a detailed discourse analysis.

Try to turn your concern into a question and then  narrow the scope of that question enough to make it “operational”. This will allow you to find sources that promise to address your concern. A poor research question would be how South Koreans think about North Korea. This question is too broad, not to mention that it assumes we can find out what a large group of people actually think . A good research question, on the other hand, would be what position the South Korean President Park Geun-hye voiced towards North Korea during the 2013 crisis between the two states. This question has everything a good research project needs: relevance, a clear topic, potential sources, and a clear time-frame .

Without such a concrete agenda, you may still enjoy analysing the text that sparked your interest, but your hard work may not be able to carry a larger project, like a graduate or even post-graduate thesis. Pick your materials based on your questions , not the other way around.

Five points you should address before getting started

To narrow down your project and decide what sources and tools will be appropriate in your case, you may want to clarify the following five points:

1)      What topic will you explore?

For instance, you could look at statements on national security, or statements on nuclear energy, or statements on health. The discourse analyst Siegfried Jäger (2004: 160-168) calls such general themes discourse strands . The idea is that such strands are intertwined, and that it can be helpful to explore not only what statements people make within one strand (Jäger calls such statements discourse fragments ), but also to explore how one strand relates to others. Think of the disaster that struck Japan in 2011: what statements did various political actors in Japan make on nuclear energy before and after the event? How did these statements draw from assumptions, beliefs, and arguments that have their roots in the discourse strand on national security, on health, or on any number of other such themes? In short: define what topic you will analyse, and note down which various discourse strands you think might be important in that regards. These notes can then become your first coding categories : the analytical attributes you assign to different units of text, such as paragraphs, sentences, or even words, to later explore their distribution across the text, and their relation to one another.

2)      What is your time frame?

There are generally two types of discourse analysis: the first focuses on a specific moment in time, and is called a synchronous analysis (Jäger 2004: 171). Discourse stretches out through time. Think of discourse for a moment as a bundle of intertwined wires, each with a different colour, that cross and twist as they stretch forward. These individual wires are the discourse strands, and the wire bundle is the discourse in its entirety. What a synchronous analysis does is dissect the bundle of wires at one spot and look at the incision: where is a specific wire located at that point? Does it touch other wires? The section where you slice into the discourse can be a major event that generates discussion. Such a discursive event could be an earthquake, or a terror attack, or an election.

The second kind of analysis looks at different sections of the wire-bundle and compares them. This is called a diachronic analysis , and is the sort of approach that the famous discourse theorist Michel Foucault favoured: he looked, for instance, at how the institutional setting of the hospital and the role of medical practitioners changed over time, and how these changes were a reflection of (and in turn an influence on) the kinds of “truths” that people held about health at different points in time (Foucault 2005/1989: 55-60).

3)      What part of society is your analysis looking at?

Are you mainly interested in the discussions of politicians? Do you want to know how a political discourse plays out among academics, or in the press, or in private setting of people’s homes? Each of these different spheres, or discourse layers  (Jäger 2004: 163), is interesting in its own right, but they also influence each other. Tracing how ideas travel between these layers through communication can be a rewarding analysis.

Think about the way in which an argument has influenced debates in different parts of society, for instance Samuel Huntington’s famous claim that the conflicts of the future will come from a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996). How did this claim make its way into journalistic texts? When did politicians start positioning themselves and their political statements in relation to Huntington’s theories? What kind of statements did this lead to? These are the kinds of questions that a multi-layer discourse analysis would ask.

4)      What medium and what language will you be working with?

A major decision on your part will be where you will look for discursive statements. You will need to be clear about the kinds of sources that promise to help you answer your question. A good analysis should explain what texts you used, where they came from, and why you chose them . You might decide, for instance, that your question is best answered by analysing Chinese newspapers, or speeches by Japanese politicians, or interviews with Korean activists.

If the source only exists in a verbal format, this does not need to stop you. You can transcribe such sources and turn them into written data, and can even add special markers to show intonations and emphases. Chilton (2004: 206) has provided a very useful list of such annotations.

Another important issue is whether your source material is already available digitally, or if you can somehow digitize your texts . It is possible to do a discourse analysis with paper-based sources, but digital texts allow you far more analytical options. Think only about how hard it is to do a text analysis without a search function. 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) .

5)      Will you need to work qualitatively or quantitatively, or maybe both?

If you are looking at one source, for instance a speech, a journalistic article, or a constitution, then your main concern will be with the kinds of discursive statements that this text makes, and the manner in which it makes them. In other words, you will likely be exploring  qualitative aspects of the discourse . 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. In such a case, it makes sense to look at the numbers first, for instance by exploring which key words appear most commonly across the different texts.

Word distribution can be an interesting research project in its own right, particularly if you can highlight major emphases in a text. Just take a look at the two very different word clouds below that I created as part of my own research on Digital Nationalism in China , using a handy visualization tool called Tagxedo . One cloud represents the most common words in the Chinese government’s white paper  on the relevance of the internet. The other is a similar representation of key words in a speech by Hillary Clinton on the same topic. You can immediately see how different the two political positions are, and where the differences lie.

I personally use such quantitative analyses as a starting point : they can reveal regularities or irregularities across vast amounts of data, and can highlight which specific parts of the text corpus might then lend themselves to a detailed qualitative analysis. In the example, it might now be interesting to check which key words appear in close proximity with one another. It might also be worth analysing what exactly the Chinese government has to say on internet security , or how the word government is used in the text, or how the two different texts use the word  people .

Gearing up for the next steps

Once you have made informed decisions on these five points, you are ready to formulate your question, pick your sources, and start your analysis. As you are get ready to launch into your materials, you may find the following step-by-step guide useful on how to conduct a discourse analysis , as well as the following  advice on how to work with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean textual sources .

Chilton, Paul (2004).  Analyzing Political Discourse – Theory and Practice . London: Arnold.

Foucault, Michel (2005/1989).  Archaeology of Knowledge . 4th ed., London: Routledge.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jäger, Siegfried (2004).  Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. (Discourse Analysis. An Introduction) . 4th ed., Münster: UNRAST-Verlag.

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About the author: florian schneider.

34 Comments

[…] up a visual communication analysis is not that different from setting up a discourse analysis. The most important thing is asking the right questions, and then critically and systematically […]

[…] for instance my blog post on how to do a discourse analysis (which is about methods) or how to set up such an analysis (which includes epistemological […]

The posts on discourse analysis are simply brilliant! so clearly and neatly explained. Really helpful when you are snowed under with a pile of DA books. They have helped me and another classmate greatly.Thank you very much and congratulations for the blog.

Glad to hear that, Isabel. Thanks for the kind words.

[…] September 24, 2014 (Alochonaa): To conduct a discourse analysis, it is absolutely essential to work with original language materials. It is not possible to […]

I want to use the critical discoursanalysies as a metod for my school work and analys a american sit-com. Is this possible? It can be a problem to transcript the text to written text.

Best regards Lena

Dear Lena, It’s definitely possible to use discourse analysis to analyse spoken words in TV, film, or radio shows, but you are right: you would need to transcribe a lot of what is being said. If that’s not what you are after (as in: if you are more interested in the visual discourse than in what is being said, linguistically), you could always try a visual communication analysis. I’ve got an introduction here on PoliticsEastAsia.com that might be helpful in that regard, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. Here’s the link: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/an-introduction-to-visual-communication-analysis/ All the best Florian

is it possible to use critical discourse analysis as a theoretical framework for a research? please elaborate if it will do. thank you so much.

That depends on your project, but in principle: yes. But you would have to focus on the questions of epistemology (how we know what we know) that inform your approach to discourse. If you haven’t checked it out yet, see my post on discourse theory for a discussion: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/getting-the-hang-of-discourse-theory/ .

Hi, I’m writing my thesis on urban governance in Mumbai. My interest/question has to do with how the relationship between government officials and NGOs (plus slum communities) changed over time from adversarial to cooperative. I’m mainly focused on the communicative part of it. Do you think a discourse analysis is the right way to look at it? Thanks in advance Adriano

Hi Adriano, I could imagine a discourse analysis for the kind of project you have in mind, but it’s not a prerequisite, I would say. It depends where your interests lie. If you are interviewing stakeholders or people affected by these collaborations, then you could indeed ask how they make sense of that sort of cooperation. How do they speak and write about it? What assumptions underlie their decisions? 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. On the other hand, if you are not interested in these discursive mechanisms, then you could simply use similar materials to map out how the collaboration works and what its effects are. That would be more of a political economy or anthropology approach. You should of course still go through the materials systematically, and the kind of coding procedures popular in discourse analysis would also help there, but you wouldn’t need to examine language strategies. As always, I would advice putting together an approach that fits your question, and if that means mixing and matching various research methods and tools, then that should be entirely alright.

Hi Florian,

First of all thank you for creating such a easy to follow blog on discourse analysis! it was only yesterday that one of my lecturers introduced me to this particular methodology. I am currently looking at researching “what does good visual arts assessment look like in the middle years?” I am interested in looking at both curriculum documents and researched literature as a guide to investigate my question, I am just wondering if applying discourse analysis to this research is a good approach/process? I am just unsure of how to approach this methodologically at this stage (research proposal) – I have read soo much my mind is blurred.

Hi Katie, I am tempted to give you a similar answer to the one I just gave Adriano (see above). It depends whether you plan to examine the kinds of strategic communication choices that your documents contain, or the assumptions and ideological frameworks that they draw from to make their case. If that is part of your question, then a discourse analysis makes good sense. If you are more interested in simply exploring what the content of your documents is, or if you hope the documents will give you access to other issues like school class dynamics and curriculum choices, then you can of course still use many of the analytic methods from discourse analysis, but I doubt you would need to explore the linguistic details of the texts. It’s a matter of where you want to take the project and what theoretical concerns you have. In any case, if you haven’t checked my other post yet on practical work steps in discourse analysis, take a look and see if any of these hands-on methods strike you as useful for your study ( http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/how-to-do-a-discourse-analysis/ ). Good luck with the project!

hi Florian! i am going to do my thesis on critical discourse analysis of a politician’s speech! i just want to ask how should i turn his oral speech into written data? can you please help me? thanks in advance!

Hi Uzma, The answer to your question depends a bit on what you want the focus of your analysis to be. You’ll likely need to transcribe the speeches (so: write up what people are saying in order for you to have a digital, written version of the texts that you can then analyse), but whether you want to include all verbal elements of the speeches (e.g. phrases like “uhm”, “oh”) and mark all phonetic aspects (pauses in the speech, intonation, and so on) will hinge on the level of detail you plan to go into. You should be aware of such transcription practices, and you should then try to explain what choices you are making for your project and why. But you may not have to produce a complete transcription. For example, if you are trying to look at a specific theme across various speeches, then you’ll probably not be interested in the detailed verbal idiosyncrasies of the spoken word; you’ll be more interested in getting your hands on a lot of materials and then checking who says what in which context, and maybe also: who uses which words or phrases when talking about the topic. For a case like this, you could create protocols of your materials first, outlining only which topics are mentioned in what time interval. You can then collect all intervals that discuss the topic you want to analyse and then transliterate those parts. Exact intonation will probably not be of interest to you in such a case. 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. In such a case, you would use far less materials, but you would transcribe in a way that really captures all verbal elements of what is being said. That way you can later compare which parts of the speech had the speaker “trip up”, or which elements received specific oral emphasis, and so on. Does this help with your question?

Thank you, man! Your tips and your Tagxedo idea saved my college seminar!! You rock!

Very glad to hear that. :)

Hi Florian, I am finalising my proposal for a post-grad research project looking at framing of climate change from a rights-based perspective. I am basing the approach on a thesis that environmental issues can be effectively ‘bandwagon-ed’ onto existing human rights frameworks, providing ‘normative and rhetorical tools’ for addressing climate inaction. I am looking for links between existing framing typologies in climate change and rights-based discourse. Is it still considered a ‘discourse analysis’ if I am searching a range of documents for particular rhetorical strands, rather than doing a full analysis of the contents of those documents? Do you have any advice on how I should approach this methodologically, or suggest sources I can read on that type of analysis? This is my first time with discourse analysis. (I’m a distance student based in Vietnam, so can access online sources much more readily than books). I don’t like to presume on your generosity with time and advice, but it would be hugely appreciated – my supervisor is MIA due to illness. Thanks & regards, Cathrine.

Hi Cathrine, Sorry to hear your supervisor is MIA. That is indeed tough. What you write so far sounds like you nevertheless have a good grip on your project. To briefly answer your questions: yes, a selective, qualitative analysis of several documents can still be a discourse analysis. 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). Since you are clearly writing about an issue that connects politics and language, I think you should be able to make a good case for a discourse analysis, if you so choose. As for how to deal with the materials, have you seen my advice here on this website? Here’s the link: How to Do a Discourse Analysis . You of course don’t have to follow all the work steps that are listed there, only the ones that you think help you answer your question. 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 ‘. Chapter 5 looks like it might be up your alley. Just a thought. Good luck with the project! Florian

Thank you very much for keeping such a helpful blog!

Currently, I am struggeling to find out what is the exact difference between a “(diachronic) discourse analysis” and a method called “conceptual history” (Begriffsgeschichte).

The latter method seems to be particularly big at Scandinavian universities (in the academic field “history of ideas”).

I have been looking into this “conceptual history” method for some days now, but I do not see how it differs from a diachronic discourse analysis. Do you perhaps have a suggestion?

Best regards,

Hi Dan, This is a very good question. I can give you my take on what I think the difference is, but just a word of warning: I’m not an intellectual historian, so it’s entirely possible that professionals in the field of ‘Begriffsgeschichte’ will disagree with my understanding of their field. The way I see it, conceptual history is about tracing how different thinkers used and developed specific philosophical concepts. A question in that field might be how the relation between ‘reality’ and our ‘idea’ of reality (‘representation’) developed from Plato to Kant to Marx to Saussure to Wittgenstein. The task here would be to analyze what rationale the individual texts establish, and to contrast the nuances of meanings in the original sources, over time. This in itself can be quite similar to the kind of linguistic analysis that discourse scholars also conduct, but there is one major difference. Discourse analysis is also interested in how concepts and their relations were informed by, and in turn influenced, social practices and institutions at a particular time in history. So a discourse analyst, working with the same question, would ask: who exactly were Plato, Kant, Marx, Saussure, and Wittgenstein? What kind of societies did they live in, and how did the socio-historical context in which they worked influence how they developed their concepts? And: how did their theories translate into practices, for instance by shaping education policy, scientific agendas, political institutions, art and media, and so on? In other words: the social context and the question of how power works through the construction of knowledge are central to discourse analysis, whereas I suspect that most scholars of ‘Begriffsgeschichte’ would focus more strongly on text-immanent meanings and their evolution rather than on such socio-linguistic concerns. Does this make sense? Let me know if you have a different understanding of the two approaches. All the best Florian

Could you, please, explain to me the best way to analyze media texts, and the steps that should be used in doing so? Thank you so much!

…just posted a reply to your other question. Hope it’s useful!

Hallo Florian, I am currently working on a research design for the cultural studies. I’m designing a critical discourse analysis of mental disabilities in one Hollywood movie. When it comes to analysing the data I’m not sure how to categorise the data. I’m orientating towards Fairclough’s model, who distinguished between ‘text’, ‘discursive practice’ and ‘social practice’. When I look at the movie I am not sure which data belongs in which category. It is clear that the transcript of the movie belongs to the ‘text’ section, also, I think, the movie itself with all the visuals. ‘Discourses Practice’ would be all production related data e.g. statement of producer, script, actor statement (is this still primary data) etc., whereas media reviews are ‘social practice’ as secondary data. Does this make sense ? I would appreciate if you could give an advice. Ciao Schöne Grüße aus London

Hi Carolin, Text, discursive practice, and social practice – a very good topic, and not at all trivial. I can tell you how I make sense of the differences, but at the risk of misrepresenting Fairclough. There might be nuances in his work I’m now overlooking. First off, I agree with you that the cultural product itself is the ‘text’ in this interpretation. I don’t particularly like using the term ‘text’, because it potentially obscures that something like a movie has elements that are specific to the medium, and that these elements may not work like regular written or spoken text. You already make this clear: ‘all the visuals’ indeed count as text, and so does the soundtrack, the dynamics, as well as any other element of visual communication that contributes to the discourse. We’re in agreement there, but I’m not sure I agree with the distinction between discursive and social practices you draw up. I would say that both of the levels that you describe are ‘discursive practices’, so the production process that leads to the cultural product as well as the reception of that product and any subsequent discussions it incites. As for social practice, I would include here the political implications of the discourse, so how the movie reflects and in turn (potentially) affects the interactions between people and the social institutions they are embedded in. 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. To give an example, something like gender-based discrimination on the job would be a social practice, the process of constructing a representation of that kind of discrimination would be a discursive practice, and the statements that in fact come out of that discursive practice would be the text. That, at least, would be my take on this distinction. Not an easy topic. Let me know what you think. Best – F

Fantastically clear, comprehensive and really helpful. Thanks a lot for this.

Thank you Dan, that means a lot. Glad I could help.

Hi! I have a question about layers of discourse analysis. I am making presentation on this theme but didn’t understand in detail. Could you clarify them? Thank you for your answer in advance.

Hi there! A ‘layer’ is just the academic way of saying that discourses take place in different context or in different kind of places. For instance, news discourse would be one such layer: it is governed by particular scripts, specific power relations, habits and conventions, jargon, etc. In news, certain things are ‘acceptable’ discourse, and other things are not. Now compare that to the discourse in a pub. That discourse is also governed by specific conventions, but they differ from those that apply in news discourse. Each of these settings is a discourse ‘layer’. The ‘layer’ is a metaphor to say that the institutional setting matters, that the different settings are connected (for example when people in a pub discuss the news), and that all the different settings in a society together form the discourse in its entirety. I hope this helps!

Hi there, which tool are you using for building word distribution map? (as you did in the case of H. Clinton’s discourse)

Sorry for the late reply! I was in China, with limited internet access. That particular image is from Tagxedo . It’s a very nice little tool to visualize word distribution, and it works with Asian languages as well. If you are looking for something more analytical, I usually use NVivo , but that’s not a free programme. It does an excellent job at quantifying word-distributions, though, and it’s very powerful when it comes to qualitative analyses. Hope this helps!

Greatly useful as always.

[…] touch upon issues of identity and morality. The discourse analysis will thus be an analysis of discourse strands – ‘themes’ – in the text (Jäger 2004, as quoted in Schneider 2013). By conducting a […]

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Methodology: Teens and parents survey

The analysis in this report is based on a self-administered web survey conducted from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023, among a sample of 1,453 dyads, with each dyad (or pair) comprised of one U.S. teen ages 13 to 17 and one parent per teen. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,453 teens is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,453 parents is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. The survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs in English and Spanish using KnowledgePanel, its nationally representative online research panel.

The research plan for this project was submitted to an external institutional review board (IRB), Advarra, which is an independent committee of experts that specializes in helping to protect the rights of research participants. The IRB thoroughly vetted this research before data collection began. Due the risks associated with surveying minors, this research underwent a full board review and received approval (Approval ID Pro00073203).

KnowledgePanel members are recruited through probability sampling methods and include both those with internet access and those who did not have internet access at the time of their recruitment. KnowledgePanel provides internet access for those who do not have it and, if needed, a device to access the internet when they join the panel. KnowledgePanel’s recruitment process was originally based exclusively on a national random-digit dialing (RDD) sampling methodology. In 2009, Ipsos migrated to an address-based sampling (ABS) recruitment methodology via the U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File (DSF). The DSF has been estimated to cover as much as 98% of the population, although some studies suggest that the coverage could be in the low 90% range. 1

Panelists were eligible for participation in this survey if they indicated on an earlier profile survey that they were the parent of a teen ages 13 to 17. A random sample of 3,981 eligible panel members were invited to participate in the study. Responding parents were screened and considered qualified for the study if they reconfirmed that they were the parent of at least one child ages 13 to 17 and granted permission for their teen who was chosen to participate in the study. In households with more than one eligible teen, parents were asked to think about one randomly selected teen and that teen was instructed to complete the teen portion of the survey. A survey was considered complete if both the parent and selected teen completed their portions of the questionnaire, or if the parent did not qualify during the initial screening.

Of the sampled panelists, 1,763 (excluding break-offs) responded to the invitation and 1,453 qualified, completed the parent portion of the survey, and had their selected teen complete the teen portion of the survey yielding a final stage completion rate of 44% and a qualification rate of 82%. The cumulative response rate accounting for nonresponse to the recruitment surveys and attrition is 2.2%. The break-off rate among those who logged on to the survey (regardless of whether they completed any items or qualified for the study) is 26.9%.

Upon completion, qualified respondents received a cash-equivalent incentive worth $10 for completing the survey. To encourage response from non-Hispanic Black panelists, the incentive was increased from $10 to $20 on Oct. 5, 2023. The incentive was increased again on Oct. 10, 2023, from $20 to $40; then to $50 on Oct. 17, 2023; and to $75 on Oct. 20, 2023. Reminders and notifications of the change in incentive were sent for each increase.

All panelists received email invitations and any nonresponders received reminders, shown in the table. The field period was closed on Oct. 23, 2023.

The analysis in this report was performed using separate weights for parents and teens. The parent weight was created in a multistep process that begins with a base design weight for the parent, which is computed to reflect their probability of selection for recruitment into the KnowledgePanel. These selection probabilities were then adjusted to account for the probability of selection for this survey which included oversamples of Black and Hispanic parents.

Next, an iterative technique was used to align the parent design weights to population benchmarks for parents of teens ages 13 to 17 on the dimensions identified in the accompanying table, to account for any differential nonresponse that may have occurred.

To create the teen weight, an adjustment factor was applied to the final parent weight to reflect the selection of one teen per household. Finally, the teen weights were further raked to match the demographic distribution for teens ages 13 to 17 who live with parents. The teen weights were adjusted on the same teen dimensions as parent dimensions with the exception of teen education, which was not used in the teen weighting.

Sampling errors and tests of statistical significance take into account the effect of weighting. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

The following tables show the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for subgroups are available upon request.

Dispositions and response rates

The tables below display dispositions used in the calculation of completion, qualification and cumulative response rates. 2

© Pew Research Center, 2024

• AAPOR Task force on Address-based Sampling. 2016. “AAPOR Report: Address-based Sampling.” ↩
• For more information on this method of calculating response rates, refer to Callegaro, Mario, and Charles DiSogra. 2008. “Computing response metrics for online panels.” Public Opinion Quarterly. ↩

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