Rich variety of DA approaches applied in social media research: A systematic scoping review

Abstract

Social media is an endless source of texts and images about almost everything. Accordingly, the number of analyses based on this source increases daily. Among the numerous methods social media can be analysed by, our attention focusses on discourse analysis (DA). DA is a complex approach which makes it possible to capture not only the linguistic characteristics of given texts, but also their socially constructive and socially constructed features. Therefore, we carried out a systematic examination of the articles at one of the largest academic databases, EBSCO available in 2019 which used DA in social media research. Our investigation studies not only the geographical distribution of this corpus, but the different self-proclaimed DA approaches. Furthermore, we developed a three-level scale in order to capture the methodological complexity of the collected articles. At one end of the scale there are those research papers where discourse appears only as a label for the textual material gathered, without further indication of any DA theories or methodologies. The other end, however, refers to those research projects which applied DA both in their theoretical and methodological frameworks, providing complex discourse analytical investigations of social media texts. This way we were able to demonstrate the wide array of DA perspectives employed in social media research.