ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the nature of discourse, what kinds of questions qualitative research can answer, how to collect, select and analyses qualitative data and different frameworks for discourse analysis, including conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, critical discourse studies and computer-mediated discourse analysis. It expands on our earlier introduction, and introduces two further approaches which draw attention to the importance of contextualising linguistic analysis: critical discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. The chapter describes how to do qualitative and discourse-based research into language in social media, because of the large overlap between the two. While verbal text has historically been the primary focus of discourse analysis, there is an important subset of research in this area that focuses on visual semiotic resources. The chapter describes some of the principles of data collection for qualitative/discursive research.
