A corpus-assisted study of the discourses of infertility in UK blogs, news articles and clinic websites
Infertility, the inability to have children when this is desirable, is reported to affect 1in 6 couples in the UK. The experience of infertility has become increasingly âmedicalisedâ (Conrad, 2004) in the context of rapid developments in assisted reproductive technologies, leading Greil et al., (2010) to posit that âthe social construction of health and illness is perhaps even more striking in the case of infertility than it is for other conditionsâ. While there is considerable work into the social aspects of infertilty, as yet there is almost no research into the linguistic or discursive representations of infertility, an absence addressed by this thesis, in the research question what are the discourses of infertility? The combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis (CADS) has been fruitfully employed previously in the study of a range of social phenomena (Partington et al., 2013; Baker et al., 2008), including health issues such as depression (Hunt, 2013) and is the approach adopted in this study. Crucial to CADS is the use of comparison, this requirement is met in this thesis by using three text types on the topic of infertility; 1) weblogs written by people experiencing infertility,
Kinloch, Karen
A corpus-assisted study of the discourses of infertility in UK blogs, news articles and clinic websites. Infertility, the inability to have children when this is desirable, is reported to affect 1in 6 couples in the UK. The experience of infertility has become increasingly âmedicalisedâ (Conrad, 2004) in the context of rapid developments in assisted reproductive technologies, leading Greil et al., (2010) to posit that âthe social construction of health and illness is perhaps even more striking in the case of infertility than it is for other conditionsâ. While there is considerable work into the social aspects of infertilty, as yet there is almost no research into the linguistic or discursive representations of infertility, an absence addressed by this thesis, in the research question what are the discourses of infertility? The combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis (CADS) has been fruitfully employed previously in the study of a range of social phenomena (Partington et al., 2013; Baker et al., 2008), including health issues such as depression (Hunt, 2013) and is the approach adopted in this study. Crucial to CADS is the use of comparison, this requirement is met in this thesis by using three text types on the topic of infertility; 1) weblogs written by people experiencing infertility,
corpus_assisted study discourse news_article website inability child desirable report affect couple experience become_increasingly conrad context rapid_development assist reproductive technology lead posit social construction health illness perhaps_even strike case condition considerable work social_aspect yet almost linguistic discursive representation absence address_question discourse combination corpus_linguistics discourse_analysis fruitfully employ previously_study range social_phenomenon baker include health issue depression hunt adopt study crucial use comparison requirement meet use text_type topic write people experience