Corpora in the Social Sciences – How corpus-based approaches can support qualitative interview analyses

Authors

  • Jennifer Fest RWTH Aachen University

Keywords:

qualitative research, corpus analysis, interdisciplinary research, interview analysis, evaluative language, speaker identities

Abstract

Qualitative and quantitative research approaches are often considered as incompatible, and when they are brought together in a study, the analyses often stay within the realm of the same research field. The study at hand aims at combining the two methods from the perspectives of different disciplines and tries to determine to which degree a corpus-based analysis might support the traditional content-focused approach to qualitative data and render additional results.

The basis for this study is a set of interviews taken from a survey in the field of educational science. It has previously been subjected to a qualitative analysis as used in social sciences. By processing the data as a corpus, this study will try to analyse in more detail the language used by the interviewees in terms of word frequencies, typical collocations and pronominal use, putting particular emphasis on the phrasing of criticism and evaluation.

Although these features can be traced relatively clearly when looking at language, they are easily overlooked or lost in an analysis categorising utterances on the basis of content only, as is the case in the given qualitative tradition. A corpus-based analysis of the data can therefore be said to give not only interesting but relevant insight into the structure of an interview and the information conveyed by the interviewees.

 DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0011

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Author Biography

Jennifer Fest, RWTH Aachen University

Jennifer Fest is a PhD student at the Department of English, American and Romance Studies at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. She graduated from RWTH Aachen University in 2011 with a Master of Arts, majoring in Sociology and English Literature and Linguistics. In her master thesis, she analysed the language of football journalism from a systemic functional perspective, using a quantitative, corpus-based approach. Since then, she has been working as a research assistant in linguistics as well as empirical educational science. Her current research interests focus on media language, forms of variation in English as well as applications of corpus linguistics in other disciplines, most prominently those of literature studies and the social sciences.

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Published

2015-11-25

How to Cite

Fest, J. (2015). Corpora in the Social Sciences – How corpus-based approaches can support qualitative interview analyses. Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Específicos, 21(2), 48–69. Retrieved from https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/393

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 2 (2015): Revista de lenguas para fines específicos

Section

Artículos/Articles

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