‘Discourse Analysis’ (DA) covers a variety of textual and language orientated research approaches used across a range of disciplines.  One of the two most commonly encountered approaches used within health research is poststructural Discourse Analysis. This is influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and aims to critically explore constructs of language and their impact (see for example, the work of Julianne Cheek, Ian Parker and Carla Willig). A second common form of Discourse Aanalysis is more akin to Conversation Analysis, and seeks to identify and plot ‘interpretative repertoires’, or forms of rhetorical sequences (see Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell).

Resources

• Cheek J (2004) ‘At the margins?  Discourse analysis and qualitative research’ Qualitative Health Research 14 (8) 1140-50.
• Potter J (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction London: Sage Publications Ltd.
• Wetherell M, Taylor S and Yates SJ (Eds) (2001) Discourse Theory and Practice  A Reader London: Sage Publications Ltd.
• Wetherell M, Taylor S and Yates SJ (Eds) (2001) Discourse as Data:  A Guide for Analysis London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Examples of published studies

• Ballinger C and Payne S (2002) ‘The construction of the risk of falling among and by older people’ Discourse and Society 22 (3) 305-24.
• Nicholls DA and Cheek J (2005) ‘Physiotherapy and the shadow of prostitution: The Society of Trained Masseuses and the massage scandals of 1894’ Social Science and Medicine 62, 2336-48.

• Seymour-Smith S and Wetherell M (2002) ‘”My wife ordered me to come!”  A discursive analysis of doctors’ and nurses’ accounts of men’s use of general practitioners’ Journal of Health Psychology 7 (3) 253-67.
• Paulson S and Willig C (2008) ‘Older women and everyday talk about the ageing body’ Journal of Health Psychology 13 (1) 106-20.