Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a commonly used qualitative research method in humanities and social sciences. Despite its common usage, there is not a single definition of discourse and there is not a single way to conduct a discourse analysis. However, precisely because there is not a rigid methodical parameter, discourse analysis offers the researcher flexibility, unlike other methods, such as the quantitative method content analysis and the qualitative method narrative analysis. In media studies, discourse analysis can be applied to analyze media contents from news reports to movie dialogues; it can also be used to analyze audience response gathered from interviews and online forums.

A traditional definition of discourse is a formal piece of spoken or written text on a certain topic. Two examples are an expository essay and an after-dinner speech. In linguistics, discourse is a unit of analysis, as in the discourse of vocabularies used by bilingual children. Discourse also refers to a body of texts of the same conventions, such as broadcast news discourse or sports discourse. In the 1980s, French philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of discourse (discours in French) heavily influenced the understanding of the term in Anglo-Saxon academia. Foucault argued that discourse has to be understood historically. Therefore, a news report about sexual assault is more than a three-minute news story. The news story has to be situated in the conventions of broadcast news (for example, the capacity of news anchors to sound authoritative and knowledgeable) and in the historical construct of the subjects, the attacker and the victim (for example, women of loose morality may be said to deserve sexual violence and attackers may be considered unable to help their sexualities).

Because of the different definitions of discourse, there are different ways to conduct a discourse analysis. Here three ways are reviewed. First, some applied linguists, such as Norman Fairclough, analyze the linguistic choice of a discourse in order to examine how the choices construct an ideology. For example, news reports often use passive voice in a sexual assault story: “A woman is attacked” is more commonly used than “A man attacked a woman.” The linguistic choice simultaneously reflects and constitutes a patriarchal ideology in which the language obscures a real gender relation. When a sentence lacks a subject, it is unclear who and which gender attacked the woman.

Second, some researchers draw on methods such as ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyze a discourse. Harold Garfinkel founded ethnomethodology to uncover social norms and conventions in daily interactions. In daily life, social actors respond to verbal interactions without questioning the meanings of words. For example, in response to a conventional “good morning,” researchers would question what the interlocutors mean by “good morning.” Conversation analysis examines the stylistics used in a conversation. Researchers record and transcribe a conversation and examine issues such as sequence and preference, interruption and silence. For example, in a conversation about sexual violence, one interlocutor may say, “News reports tend to give too many details about what the victim wears.” The response can be, “I agree” (a preferred answer) or “I disagree” (a “dispreferred” answer). Research commonly shows that women tend to give preferred answers more than men do. Men also tend to interrupt others more often, and women tend to be silent after being interrupted.

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