Discussion Question

Read the articles and summarize for your classmates the videos on the discourse and content analysis for this week.

In your summary, explain how the methodologies may differ depending on which specific discipline in the humanities or social sciences you are using.

Search the web and find articles that you feel best support the points you made in your summary and explanations that you can recommend to your classmates.

Content analysis is the study of recorded human communications such as websites, books, emails texts.

There are two types of content analysis. 

Conceptual analysis- analyzing the existence and frequency of concepts in human conversation.

Relational analysis -  analyzing the relationship of concepts in human communication.

In Content analysis, there are two forms of content:

1)    Manifest content or the observable content

2)    Latent content or underlying meaning of the content

Content analysis is unobtrusive, low cost and allows for quantitative/qualitative research. You are focusing on the content and not dealing with people directly. (Flipp, 2014)

 Discourse analysis can be defined in three ways:

1) As language beyond the sentence, individuals who might be interested in this would be linguist or others that study different languages and how their sentences are structured or linked together and their formal properties.  

2) As language in use, this would be applied to applied linguist in things like conversation analysis of empirical use. Like when a doctor talks to a patient, the doctor speaks as a figure of authority.  

3) As larger social processes that precede and are produced by language. Social scientist would be interested in the social practices of these instance of discourse. They would use this route to explore and study critical issues of power relations and how inequality plays out through language. (Schneider, 2013)   (Educational Foundations and Research, 2015)

The article I found that shows a good example of content analysis is “Qualitative content analysis of online news media coverage of weight loss surgery and related reader comments” The article explores how the media has the ability to affect public opinion and policy direction. (N. M. Glenn, 2012)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cob.12000/abstract

For Discourse analysis, I chose the article “Critical Discourse Analysis in Education: A Review of the Literature” as an example that will give a better understanding of it. In this article the authors review the findings of their literature review of Critical Discourse Analysis in educational research. (Rebecca Rogers, 2005)

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00346543075003365

References

Educational Foundations and Research, U. o. (Director). (2015). What is Discourse Analysis? [Motion Picture].

Flipp, C. (Director). (2014). Content Analysis [Motion Picture].

N. M. Glenn, C. C. (2012). Quailtative content analysis of online news media coverage of weight loss surgery and related reader comments. Clinical Obesity, Pages 125–131.

Rebecca Rogers, E. M.-B. (2005). Review of Educational Research. SAGE Journals, 365-416.

Schneider, F. (Director). (2013). Introduction to Discourse Analysis [Motion Picture].