Discourse Analysis - as it is used in consumer research anyway - is a method of analysing text to identify what people really mean by studying how they said it.
'Text' can be transcribed speech or written text of any kind.
What do I mean by 'what people really mean?' and how does discourse analysis do this?
The idea behind it is that when we speak or write we are doing more than conveying facts; we are expressing our identity, creating social bonds, and taking psychologically protective action.
We look for the metaphors people use, the stance they adopt, how they try to protect themselves from disagreement ........ and more
People use more than words when they speak or write. When we speak, we communicate in at least seven ways simultaneously:
- Obviously, by the actual words we use.
- In speech: through intonation - where we place emphasis, the rise and fall of the voice, to express emotions that the words themselves don't convey.
- The words which seem to have low semantic content but which are often super-charged - the modifiers, repeated words, the ums and don't knows. Silences.
- The structure of the discourse - the order in which the speaker expressed his/her ideas.
- Inferences - things that were not said, but were still inferred by other speakers.
- Rhetorical devices. People choose their words to persuade others of their point of view, or to protect their own self-image, or to play a role.
- Words that go together - known as collocation.
Basically, discourse analysis analyses what people say or write, by going deeper than a superficial count of the individual words they use.
Some researchers believe that research participants don't tell research interviewers what they really think. Well of course that is true, because that is how normal conversations occur.
I disagree with the solution that some researchers promote to solve this problem though. Some researchers believe that because people don't always say what they think, we shouldn't ask them anything. That's just silly. Discourse analysis shows us that people often convey what they think, even though they might not actually say it out loud.
