Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is a qualitative method that studies written and spoken language in its social context: how people use words to build meaning, identities and relationships, and what that reveals beyond the literal content of what they say.
How it works
Where most coding asks what people talked about, discourse analysis asks how they talked about it. Analysts look at word choice, metaphors, repeated phrases, what is taken for granted, who speaks with authority and what is left unsaid, across whole conversations or collections of texts rather than single sentences.
Approaches range from close linguistic analysis to critical discourse analysis, which examines how language reflects and reinforces power. In market and customer research, it shows how a category is talked about: whether customers describe insurance as protection or as a tax, for example, which shapes how a brand should speak to them.
A worked example
For a pension provider, 30 interviews about retirement saving turn up two competing ways of talking about the same product. Twenty-two participants call their pension "money I can't touch" and only 4 call it "my future income". The provider rewrites its annual statements to lead with the monthly income the pension will pay, with the pot's total value second.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
A discourse analyst can work from a Pulse transcript and its recording together, listening for the pause or laugh that changes what the words mean.