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Discursive Psychology: A Discursive Approach to Identity Work in Online Illness Talk

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Analysing Health Communication

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Abstract

This chapter sets out to demonstrate what the perspective of discursive psychology entails and attempts to show how the approach is particularly well-suited to the analysis of online health communication in two environments: online support groups and illness blogs. As a demonstration of analysis, a case study will be presented that is part of current research on illness blogs, focusing on blogs of people who have had ileostomy surgery. The analysis will show how individuals with an ostomy bag account for their decision to undergo ileostomy surgery and present themselves as a ‘new normal’ (Lamerichs and Van Hooijdonk 2019). Throughout this chapter, all sites of online interaction will be referred to as ‘illness talk’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The study has not only addressed the sequential organisation in the discussion thread, but has also examined the thread as a ‘categorization activity’, making use of membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to show how categories such as ‘glamourizing anorexia’ are something to account for, and how category work also includes attributing other categories to the newcomer, such as the category ‘ill” (see also Vayreda and Antaki 2009; for a discussion on forum norms related to the particular condition in this particular forum for people with bipolar disorder, see Sacks 1972 and Emanuel A. Schegloff 2007 on MCA).

  2. 2.

    Ethical considerations of online research recognise that the mere ‘public’ availability of data such as blogs does not suffice as an argument for collecting data. In particular, there has been a shift in conceptualising what counts as ‘public’ or ‘private’ in terms of both content (addressing highly private topics) and access to the space (see Lamerichs and Stommel 2020 for a full discussion). For the current study permission was initially sought from the platform host to contact the bloggers and use the blogs made available through her website in our study. Where the host previously showed to be responsive to other parties (i.e., journalists) with an interest in her platform, she has not yet responded to e-mails in which permission was asked to study the linguistic features of the blogs on her website. In this chapter, I therefore refer to all bloggers with pseudonyms and have removed all identifying information in the blogs and all images or links to personal webpages or Facebook.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language, Literature and Communication, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Joyce Lamerichs

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  1. Joyce Lamerichs
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Correspondence to Joyce Lamerichs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Gavin Brookes

  2. School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Daniel Hunt

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Lamerichs, J. (2021). Discursive Psychology: A Discursive Approach to Identity Work in Online Illness Talk. In: Brookes, G., Hunt, D. (eds) Analysing Health Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68184-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68184-5_5

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