Analyzing Text and Discourse: Nine Approaches for the Social Sciences

Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches. 

Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research. 

Methods include: 
• Content analysis 
• Narrative analysis 
• Critical discourse studies 
• Multimodal discourse analysis 

Anders Björkvall is Professor of Swedish at Örebro University. His main research interests are multimodality, textual, genre and discourse analysis and literacy in children and young people, often focusing on how digital and analogue technologies and artefacts interact. In recent years, he has been interested in texts and genres in organisations and in 2016–2019 he worked on a project on state values texts, A New Genre and Its Archaeology: The Values of Swedish Authorities, which was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. He runs the STINT-funded project Multimodal text and pedagogies in higher education, a collaboration with the University of Cape Town within the framework of the South Africa–Sweden Bilateral Scientific Research Cooperation. Anders is the project manager for the national graduate school Multimodality and Intermediality: Research in the Humanities in a Digital World (MIDvärld), funded by the Swedish Research Council. He is also editor of the journal Multimodality & Society (Sage).

Anders is interested in collaboration issues, and in 2020-2022 he was scientific director of RUC – Regional Development Centre at Örebro University.

Kristina Boréus is Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has studied ideology and ideological change, discrimination against migrants and racialized employees at Swedish workplaces, and right-wing populism in Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. Her publications in English include ‘Patterned Inequalities and the Inequality Regime of a Swedish Housing Company’ (with Ulf Mörkenstam, 2015, in Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies); ‘Nationalism and Discursive Discrimination against Immigrants in Austria, Denmark and Sweden’ (2013, in Wodak, R., KhosraviNik, M. & Mral, B. (eds) Right-Wing Populism in Europe, Bloomsbury Academic) and ‘Discursive Discrimination: A Typology’ (2006, in European Journal of Social Theory). She takes an interest in different kinds of textual analysis as method and theory and has published Textens mening och makt (with Göran Bergström, Studentlitteratur), a Swedish textbook that appeared in its third edition in 2012.

Per-Anders Svärd earned his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 2015, with a dissertation on the emergence of the modern animal welfare paradigm in Swedish politics. Since 2018, he is a Senior Lecturer in Social Studies at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Science at Örebro University.

Svärd′s research has mainly been within the multidisciplinary field of critical animal studies, where he has studied ideological constructions of the human–animal relationship. His theoretical interests include animal rights philosophy and political theory, along with Marxist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytical social theory.

Since 2007, Svärd has taught many university courses on political theory, theories of democracy, methods in social science, theories of power, textual and discourse-analytical methods, contemporary feminist theory, animal ethics, and critical animal studies. 

Per-Anders Svärd is also an Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, co-founder and Section Editor for the open-access journal Politics and Animals, and a board member of The Centre for Marxist Social Studies [Centrum för marxistiska samhällsstudier].