Investigating Adolescent Health Communication: A Corpus Linguistics Approach (Corpus and Discourse)

A comprehensive corpus analysis of adolescent health communication is long overdue – and this book provides it. We know comparatively little about the language adolescents use to articulate their health concerns, and discourse analysis of their choices can shed light on their attitudes towards and beliefs about health and illness.

This book interrogates a two million word corpus of messages posted by adolescents to an online health forum. It adopts a mixed method corpus approach to health communication, combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Analysis in this way gives voice to an age group whose subjective experiences of illness have often been marginalized or simply overlooked in favour of the concerns of older populations.