Some things I have learnt while using corpus methods to study health communication

On a dark winter afternoon in December 2011 (before CASS existed), an email from the Economic and Social Research Council informed me that they would fund the project ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care’, which I had put forward with several colleagues from Lancaster. The project involved a combination of manual analysis and corpus methods to study the metaphors used in a 1.5-million-word corpus consisting of interviews and online forum posts by people with advanced cancer, family carers and healthcare professionals. Even in the elation following that announcement, I could not remotely foresee how important that project would become in my (professional) life, and how much interest it would attract from healthcare professionals, charities, the media and the general public. That interest, I now realise, is due to two main factors. First, the topic of communication about cancer and end-of-life is important and intrinsically interesting. In particular, most people have strong feelings about the metaphors used for cancer, such as the ubiquitous but much hated ‘battle against cancer’ that is ‘lost’ by people who die of the disease. The second factor in the success of the project is even simpler: corpus methods actually make sense to people.

At the beginning of the project, I expected that it would be difficult to get audiences outside (corpus) linguistics to understand and appreciate our methods. I was wrong. I have consistently found that people generally, and healthcare professionals in particular, quickly become interested in corpus methods and appreciative of what can be learnt from them. After all, healthcare professionals are used to large-scale quantitative studies and statistical analyses, and therefore do not find corpus-based research at all alien. The dissemination of our findings has therefore been much better received than I would ever have imagined.

A paper we published in BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care has been the most read in that journal from February 2015 to January 2016. In that paper we provide evidence from our patient data of the potential negative, disempowering effects of Violence metaphors (e.g. when a patient says: ‘I feel such a failure for not winning this battle’). However, we also show that those same metaphors are motivating and empowering for some people, who proudly embrace the identity of ‘fighters’ (e.g. when another patient says: ‘cancer and the fighting of it is something to be proud of’). Our paper shows a similar pattern for Journey metaphors, which are used in preference to Violence metaphors in policy documents and guidelines on cancer and end-of-life in the UK’s National Health System (e.g. ‘my cancer journey’). In our patient data, Journey metaphors are used in positive and empowering ways by some people, and in negative and disempowering ways by others. From a healthcare professional’s point of view, this means that there is no easy one-size-fits-all approach to communication about cancer. Rather, it is essential to be sensitive to the language used by individual patients, and to adapt one’s own responses accordingly. The fact that this message has attracted so much interest is due in large part to the nature and amount of evidence that we have been able to provide by using corpus linguistic methods. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Corpus linguistics MOOC: Second run beginning soon

We are running the corpus MOOC again – and we are really looking forward to it. In the first run of the course we taught social scientists and other researchers from across the globe about how to use corpus linguistics to study language. We looked at a range of topics of contemporary social relevance in doing so – including how we talk about disability and how newspapers write about refugees. We also looked at key areas where corpus linguistics has contributed greatly, notably the areas of dictionary construction and language teaching.

The result, I must say, exceeded our expectations – which were pretty high. People really seemed to like the course and get a lot from it. Even though the approach was entirely new to most students, a very large number worked through all eight weeks of the course. The feedback on our training has been exceptionally strong – a look at the #corpusMOOC hashtag on Twitter will give a good idea of the overwhelmingly positive response to that course. The following quote, from a Chinese notice board on which our MOOC was discussed, gives a strong sense of how the course succeeded both in training students and in showing them that corpora have a key role to play in exploring social science questions (thanks to Richard Xiao for the translation):

“CorpusMOOC, with its assembly of the best corpus linguists and rich content, cannot be praised enough … The greatest benefit for me has been that the course has widened my vision: corpus linguistics and the applications of corpus technologies have gone far beyond what I had imagined – more resembling big data in the field of social science research instead of being confined to linguistics… I think the significance of this course lies not merely in teaching a large number of corpus techniques but more, rather, in introducing corpora and demonstrating what corpora can be used for, thus making us aware of them and helping us understand their importance … the corpus-based approach is the unavoidable approach to language in future.”

The first run of the MOOC had a great impact – the course was taken mainly by women (70.44% of students), and drew participants from all continents and a wide range of countries – including places as far flung as the British Antarctic Territory! The areas in which course participants were working and researching were heavily oriented to the social sciences, with students drawn from areas such as business consulting and management, health and social care and media and publishing. The greatest contribution of the course, however, seems to have come from providing training to teachers/lecturers in the UK and beyond. Given that the great majority of students were taking the course for career development (78.59%), the course was likely not only to have had a strong effect on this group but also, by extension, on the students who are exposed to the ideas in the course by the teachers/lecturers who took it.

Having read this, you can probably understand why we were keen to run the course again. Through it we have been able to get a good understanding of corpus linguistics across to thousands of people around the globe. We have made a few changes to the course based on the feedback we received – all designed to make a good course better! This includes new lectures (for example on the language used in cancer treatment) and new in conversation pieces with corpus linguists (such as Douglas Biber).

If this run of the course proves as popular as the first, which we think it should, we plan to run the course every September. Who knows when we will stop!

For a limited time, registration is still open. Book your place on ‘Corpus linguistics: method, analysis, interpretation’ now. 

Elena Semino appears on BBC World Service ‘Healthcheck’

CASS project affiliate (and head of department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University) Elena Semino was interviewed about the findings of the ESRC-funded project ‘Metaphor in End-of-Life Care’ on the BBC World Service’s programme ‘Healthcheck’, presented by Claudia Hammond. The programme will air four times between 7th and 11th May 2014; the first 15 minutes of the programme focus on metaphors and cancer.

 

“Fighting Words Are Rarer Among British Doctors”: ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care’ project findings featured in the New York Times

Key findings from the CASS-affiliated ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care‘ (MELC) project have been featured in the New York Times. Journalist Paula Span interviews Principal Investigator Elena Semino and compares findings from the UK-based project to her own experiences in the US. Whereas ‘British public health leaders and medical practitioners are more apt to talk about the end of life as a “journey” instead of a war, with “pathways” and “steps” instead of fights and weapons’, Span finds frequent references to battles ‘on websites for cancer organizations in the United States, like Susan G. Komen and the American Cancer Society’.

Read more about the team’s findings and Span’s comparison to discursive practices in the US by accessing the full article on the New York Times: Fighting Words Are Rarer Among British Doctors