Textual Analysis - Content Analysis and CDA Flashcards
What is textual analysis useful for?
Description - looking at what information is present in social/political documents
Explanation - analysing underlying meanings, relationships, implications within a text.
What is content analysis? What does it hope to achieve?
Content analysis looks to find patterns, themes, biases and meanings in texts.
Explain the coding process in content analysis studies
Qualitative data is subdivided into smaller, analysable units by creating categories and concepts from the data. This looks to identify themes and relationships between themes.
What is deductive coding? What is inductive coding?
Deductive coding: working from pre-existing themes and codes derived from existing theory and research to look at a text. Drafting categories before starting analysis.
Inductive coding: researchers immerse themselves in documents to identify different themes. During Analysis, allows categories to emerge while you analyse texts.
What is the abductive approach in content analysis studies?
The abductive approach combines deductive and inductive coding strategies in the research process.
What are manifest and latent content analysis respectively?
- Manifest: Focuses on the surface-level, obvious, or directly observable aspects of the content
- Latent: Goes beyond the surface to interpret the underlying, implicit, or symbolic meanings within the content
What are conceptual and relational reporting respectively?
- Conceptual: determines how often a concept appears but does not examine the relationships between concepts (quantitative)
- Relational:Goes beyond just identifying concepts and examines how they are related within a text (qualitative)
What disadvantages are there of content analysis?
Reductive
Focusing on words or phrases in isolation can sometimes be overly reductive, disregarding context, nuance, and ambiguous meanings.
Subjective
Content analysis almost always involves some level of subjective interpretation, which can affect thereliability and validityof the results and conclusions.
Time intensive
Manually coding large volumes of text is extremely time-consuming, and it can be difficult to automate effectively.
What is Critical Discourse Analysis? What does it believe discourse to be? What does it aim to achieve?
CDA is an analytical approach which explains ways that discourse constructs, maintains and legitimises inequalities. It sides frequently with oppressed social groups, seeing discourse not just as language used, but as social practice. It can shape and be shaped by events.
How is topoi/topos used in discourse to make arguments?
Topoi/topos tends to appeal to supposedly common sense arguments and assertions, painting certain ideas to be rational and therefore beyond reasonable debate.
Explain how the three-dimensional approach works and how this sees language as a social practice.
The three-dimensional approach sees language working in 3 ways
- as containing linguistic features (repetition, imagery, metaphors, hyperbole, etc.) that have effects
- as a discursive practice involving the production and consumption of texts
- as an interpretation of these texts in a particular context
What is the discourse historical approach? How does it operate?
The discourse historical approach investigates how historical contexts of discourse impact the interpretation and explanation of texts.
This process unfolds by identifying contents or topics, then looking at what discursive strategies are used, before exploring textual features and techniques at the micro-level.
