Picking the right cherries? A comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculinity

Abstract

As a way of comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches to critical discourse analysis (CDA), two analysts independently examined similar datasets of newspaper articles in order to address the research question 'How are different types of men represented in the British press?'. One analyst used a 41.5 million word corpus of articles, while the other focused on a down-sampled set of 51 articles from the same corpus. The two ensuing research reports were then critically compared in order to elicit shared and unique findings and to highlight strengths and weaknesses between the two approaches. This article concludes that an effective form of CDA would be one where different forms of researcher expertise are carried out as separate components of a larger project, then combined as a way of triangulation.

The topography of masculine normativities in South Africa

“…By using these terms to build our sub-corpus, we are able to hone in on discussions of masculinity in our dataset and explore the ways in which different types of men are represented and positioned (cf. Baker & Levon, 2015, 2016. The resulting subcorpus contains approximately 90,000 articles with a total of 18.4 million words.…”

Not so ‘innocent’ after all? Exploring corporate identity construction online

“…Baker & Levon, 2015 for the advantages of such an approach). Some of the benefits of using such a mixed methods approach for identity research were pointed out by van de Mieroop (2007van de Mieroop ( : 1122 who maintained that a quantitative analysis provides "a bird's eye view of the presence of identity" thus offering initial insights into the data -which is particularly useful when dealing with relatively large data sets, as in our case -which can then help identifying potentially interesting sites for further scrutiny.…”

A Critical Discourse Study of Chinese Professors' Image Construction in Microblogging Discourse

“…(micro-level) (2) Who is involved in the discursive practices and in what role? (meso-level) (3) What social factors impact on the text and on discourse practice?…”