Chapter 12. Does Britain need any more foreign doctors? Inter-analyst consistency and corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis

It is argued that corpus methods help to reduce analyst bias in conducting (critical) discourse analysis. This paper describes an experiment whereby five analysts were independently given a British newspaper corpus about foreign doctors and asked to analyse how such doctors were represented. The resulting five reports were analysed to compare which findings were shared, which varied and which factors may help predict variance or productivity of analysis. Considerable variance was found in the findings of the five analysts, meaning we cannot claim that corpus approaches to critical discourse analysis completely remove bias. However, such approaches seem effective at identifying ‘majority’ patterns and giving an overall picture of the data.