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

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. You can get an overview of the available options here, so I won’t go into detail in this post. The main takeaway, however, is that 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.