INTRODUCTION
A survey of access to the internet in the UK conducted in 2008 revealed that the internet is used by 79% of men and 75% of women of all ages including 72% of people aged 55–64 years and 32% of people aged ≥65 years.1 Internet data that is freely and publicly accessible are now being used for research purposes.2,3
Internet communities offer an increasingly important source of information expressed openly by individuals. In particular, the internet offers access to hard-to-reach groups who are often excluded (or exclude themselves) from traditional research studies.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis (DA), an approach to analysing naturally occurring language, is a technique that is particularly suited to examining internet data.4,5 DA is pertinent to health care for it has the potential to reveal the dimensions of health beliefs, the doctor–patient relationships and the dissemination of health information. The focus of DA is on communicative behaviour.6 Within internet forums communicative behaviour is the manner in which individuals communicate through written text.
At a basic level, interrogation with linguistic analysis software reveals word frequency. Frequency is a simple way to identify problems and issues. We can look at how patterns of words colocate together and uncover associations between words (that is, concordances) that may provide insights into people, groups, and ideas. With the development of computers, linguistics has become involved using concordancing where keywords from a body of text, often termed a corpus, are highlighted in their surrounding context.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo are, at heart, simple concordancers in their browsing functions. They offer the casual user the opportunity to search a very large database …
