Analysing Health Communication by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030681845
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.1 Data and Analytical Approaches

On some online forums, patients consult doctors about their health concerns—see, for example, Anesa and Fage-Butler’s (2016) characterization of a doctor-patient forum as a site of popularizing knowledge. However, many online forums facilitate the exchange of knowledge, opinions and experiences between members of the general public, where posts are evaluated and critiqued by peers, often leading to robust exchanges. Concerns have been expressed about the effects of online forums on perceptions of truthfulness (Brossard and Scheufele 2013).

As the main purpose of this chapter is methodological, demonstrating what FDA can do rather than performing a comprehensive empirical analysis of a larger data set, I selected a single forum thread for analysis. I did not participate in the forum, but just observed. The data were freely available online without password protection. I collected the text of the posts, omitting personal information such as usernames. Danish legislation does not require ethical approval for a study of this type because it did not include any biological material or influence the usual treatment of the participants. However, to safeguard the anonymity of the participants and confidentiality, I followed the British Psychological Society’s (2017) ethical guidance on anonymizing online data, removing information that might identify the thread/forum and lightly editing the posters’ texts to avoid traceability of the quotations included in the chapter with search engines. This involved directly correcting typos or grammatical mistakes; directly replacing characteristic phrases; directly writing abbreviations out in full; directly replacing ‘it’ with its referent in the text; omitting shorter, less relevant sections with […]; and replacing certain words/phrases with close synonyms in square brackets [ ]. A manual check verified the untraceability of the quotations that had been through the anonymization processes just described.

Analysing health-related debates that unfold online can be undertaken in many ways. Indicative of the range of possibilities, Tangherlini et al. (2016) conducted a quantitative analysis of anti-vaccination narratives using digitized topic modelling, Ruiz and Barnett (2015) used automatized semantic network analysis to explore the information provided on HPV websites, Ma and Stahl (2017) used multimodal critical discourse analysis to analyse Facebook postings about HPV, and Sak et al. (2016) and Madden et al. (2011) undertook content analysis of vaccine-related webpages and HPV-related websites, respectively. FDA has been used to analyse online debates about hospitals as optimal or less optimal birth settings (Fage-Butler 2017a), and the riskiness (or not) of homebirth (Fage-Butler 2017b).

In this chapter, two analytical approaches derived from Foucault’s (1972) great methodological/theoretical work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, provide the strategies for analysing the representation of knowledge and knowledge-related subjectivities in the current data set. First, statement function analysis provides a means of analysing the discursive construction of knowledge. Statements are on the ‘surface’ of spoken or written discourse (Fox 1998: 418). A statement is the smallest unit that constructs a discursive object (Foucault 1972: 80), such as knowledge. It can be equivalent in length to a grammatical sentence (Foucault 1972: 86), but it may be longer if the same discursive object is constructed over a number of sentences.

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