Being acquainted with discourse analysis. Types of discourse. What (Exactly) Is Discourse Analysis?

Being acquainted with discourse analysis. Types of discourse.
What (Exactly) Is Discourse Analysis?
A Plain-Language Explanation & Definition (With Examples)
Discourse analysis is one of the most popular qualitative analysis techniques we encounter at Grad Coach.

Overview: Discourse Analysis Basics
In this post, we’ll explain in plain, straightforward language:

1. 
   What discourse analysis is
   
2. 
   When to use discourse analysis
   
3. 
   The main approaches to discourse analysis
   
4. 
   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.