What is discourse analysis?
Qualitative, explores how discourses give legitimacy and meaning to social practices and institutions.
Aim: to reveal meanings attached to what actors are doing which in pol analysis is important for conceptualising and explaining the actions and attitudes we observe.
What is content analysis?
Quantitative and qualitative, Concerned with the study of the text itself rather than the broad context in which it was produced.
Draws inferences about meaning through frequency of words, phrases, image and patterns.
Meaning and purpose can be interpreted in this textual context
How do you know if you identified a discourse?
- A discourse is a system of texts that bring objects into being, consist of ensembles of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is produced.
- Are the patterns of meaning identified plausible? Do they constitute reality?
- Coherence within a larger theoretical framework?
- Clearly related to textual evidence?
In what context or set of conditions does discourse exist?
Local: Immediate task and situation, the source, the message, channel and intended audience.
Broad: Cultural norms, assumptions about knowledge, beliefs and values.
Micro-discourse: Specific study of language use.
Macro-discourse: Power, dominance, inequality between social groups.
What are the moment in the dialectical relationship of discourse and social change.
- Emergence: Translating and condensing of complex realities into new discourse using already existing discourses.
- Hegemony: Contestation among discourses and between strategies and groups leading to hegemony among some.
- Re-contextualisation: Dissemination in new orgs, institutions and fields.
- Operationalization: Enactment of discourses, new ways of being, acting and identities.
What is manifest content?
Easily observable on the surface of communication (counting the number of times a word or phrase occurs) - quantitative.
What is latent content?
Inference of underlying meanings, more sensitive to context - qualitative
Foucaults channels of inquiry to explore the construction of social reality through discourse.
- how ways of talking about a topic are embedded in sets of power relations;
- how these power relations are supported by institutions (asylums, governments, prisons, and schools) in particular historical contexts;
- how these institutional and historical configurations of discourse constructed new kinds of human subjects.
Other Foucault stuff xo
- Development of knowledge is intertwined with the mechanisms of power and the exploration into reiterated key words and statements recurring across texts delimit the fields of knowledge.
- Asks whether the natural and social worlds are indeed knowable, accessible and anlysable without recourse to the constitutive forces of discourse
- Did not think there were definite underlying structures that could exp human condition.
What is critical discourse analysis?
Seeks to expose the connections between language power and ideology.
Concerned with the role of discourse in enacting, reproducing and resisting social power abuse, dominance and inequality.
What are the 4 steps for carrying out content analysis?
1) Select the material to be analysed.
2) Define the categories or topics of interest that you will search for in the material you have selected to analyse.
3) Choose the recording unit.
4) Coding
- Creating a protocol for identifying the target variables and categories.
- Creating codes that will signal them in the text.
- Coding using the protocols and codes.
What are the five recording units used in content - analytic studies?
- Single word or symbol.
- Sentence or paragraph.
- Theme
- Character.
- Item or whole text.
Reliability of content analysis
- Coder stability
- Reproducibility.
- Objectivity.
