critical discourse analysis

Common research methods in critical discourse analysis include qualitative and quantitative CDA approaches, corpus-based techniques, multimodal analysis, conversation analysis, and mixed corpus–qualitative methods.

Discourse analysts study a wide range of text types, including film, government documents, narrative accounts, newspapers, social media (e.g., Twitter), and photographic or signage materials from public spaces.

Recent editions explicitly address digital media and new communication technologies by adding chapters and case studies on online discourse. They note how new platforms and formats produce distinct types of discourse and discuss methods for analyzing digital texts, multimodal posts, and platform-specific interaction.

There are introductory textbooks that present core approaches and offer a practical toolkit, typically including chapters on key methods, exercises, discussion questions, and companion website materials to support learning.

Handbook-style resources can be very comprehensive, often appearing in multi-volume formats with hundreds of pages and numerous updated chapters that cover broad theoretical and methodological developments.

Discourse theory is used to examine media politics and the relationship between discourse and democratic or political processes, combining theoretical discussion with empirical studies to investigate how media shape contemporary politics.

Common techniques include co-occurrence comparisons, diachronic analyses of collocation, and combining corpus methods with qualitative and multimodal analysis of photographic and textual data.