Investigating Adolescent Health Communication: A Corpus Linguistics Approach

Description

A comprehensive corpus analysis of adolescent health communication is long overdue - and this book provides it. We know comparatively little about the language adolescents use to articulate their health concerns, and discourse analysis of their choices can shed light on their attitudes towards and beliefs about health and illness. This book interrogates a two million word corpus of messages posted by adolescents to an online health forum. It adopts a mixed method corpus approach to health communication, combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Analysis in this way gives voice to an age group whose subjective experiences of illness have often been marginalized or simply overlooked in favour of the concerns of older populations.

Kevin Harvey is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK.

[T]he first book-length study in which corpus linguistics is used in interrogating adolescent health discourse ... [It] has much to offer to linguistics and health practitioners who want to improve communication with young people. * SKY Journal of Linguistics * Investigating Adolescent Health Communication does indeed push back boundaries: in applied linguistic research practice, in methodology, in its rich interdisciplinarity and in its potential for impact on a key and hitherto relatively neglected area of social life. It is model of applied linguistics in action and it brings to the arena a use of corpus linguistics which is distinctive, richly nuanced, and exemplary. [From the 'Preface'] -- Professor Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham, UK This is a fascinating and unique book which clearly and critically reflects on methods used to examine the discourse within 2 million word corpus of health-related emails. It has much to offer, both to corpus linguists in terms of best practice in combining qualitative and quantitative methods and to health practitioners who want to improve communication with adolescents. -- Paul Baker, Professor of English Language, Lancaster University, UK