Abstract
Providing an exact definition of discourse analysis is a matter fraught with difficulty, as there are a number of competing schools of thought, as well as ongoing debates and developments in both theory and practice. Discourse analysis (DA) evolved within a range of diverse disciplinary contexts, including literary criticism, linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy and sociology. The influence of these disciplines shapes the various strands of discourse analysis practised in psychology today. For example, within linguistic psychology, the focus is on fine-grained sentence structure and utterances; within cognitive psychology, attention is paid to the role of mental schemas and scripts in the comprehension of language (see Potter, 2004). However, the two strands of DA that originated within literary theory, sociology and philosophy have had the greatest influence on the discipline and are the most widely used methods of DA in health and clinical psychology. They will thus form the focus of this chapter.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Qualitative Research in Clinical and Health Psychology |
| Editors | Poul Rohleder, Antonia C. Lyons |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Palgrave |
| Pages | 218-237 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781137291042 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |