Discoure Analysis is a qualitative analysis in which the analysts must go beyond the data that is available and
focus particularly on language.
In discourse analysis the choice of one description over another, and the association of one description with
another, is significant.
A very powerful discursive practice in political argument was to change verbs into nouns ("nominalisation"), and to use passive rather than active forms of verbs. So politicians don't say "we are going to privatise the railways". They say "There will be a privatisation of the railways".This choice of grammatical form is a discursive practice.
Its effect constitutes the transfer of public goods into private hands as 'agentless'.
Gunther Kress in Wetherell et al, 2001
http://hpq.sagepub.com/content/14/2/326.full.pdf
This is a discourse analysis of women heavy drinkers' accounts
In this analysis they analyse the different meanings of drinking among different groups of women. The reason of drinking could vary from self medication to leisure. It discovered a wider cultural ambivalence about women's drinking and how the women have to fight to perform the balance to protect themselves from having a stigmatised identity. It was surprising how the talk of the women was more focused towards social impact rather than health impact of drinking. What can also be derived from this study is that women avoid seeking medical assistance as they don't want to be labelled as an addict.
