Investigating Adolescent Health Communication A Corpus Linguistics Approach [Hardcover]

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.

Acknowledgements \ Preface \ 1. Introduction: why study adolescent health communication? \ 2. Adolescent health communication: Internet health provision and the language of email \ 3. Putting adolescent health in context \ 4. Methods and data: introducing the corpus approach to health communication \ 5. Identifying key concerns: surveying the AHEC \ 6. Communicating delicacy: reproductive health concerns \ 7. Questions about sexual transmitted infections: HIV and AIDS \ 8. Communicating distress: suicide and self-harm \ 9. Communicating distress: depression \ 10. Concluding discussion \ References \ Index

Kevin Harvey is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK.