Master of Science in International Business and Trade (IBT) Programme
School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg.
Autumn 2015 | Lecture Slides
Language in Qualitative Research | Discourse Analysis
The idea behind this lecture is to lend an overview to the role of language in qualitative methodology, what language frameworks and tools are available in the design of qualitative research for a master thesis write-up.
Qualitative research design and method puts into focus content analysis. In addressing ‘content analysis’, it is often the case that the field of Language is encountered, landing in essentially, Linguistics as the science of the study of language. There is little way around looking at language per se due to the fact that language is encoded into our biological systems, and that humans are genetically social creatures. We use language to perform social transactions, social functions, to exchange ideas, information and basically construct, and manage our reality. The knowledge of how we use language is something easily taken for granted, because we were born with this capacity for language, and the grammatical structures have been in place from very early in our childhood.
Language in qualitative research can be likened to a Swiss Army Knife, where it is both a framework and a set of tools that can be applied to the needs of international business studies, depending on the research question and focus of the thesis. This lecture can be seen as an information session that highlights what could be interesting to use as a framework and tool of data analysis, providing a starting point and a direction.
Click on the thumbnails below to access the slides, uploaded in a three-part series in pdf format.
