Exploring Professional Discourse Using Data from Online Discussion Forums: Showcase of Three Methods

Jemma Bae Kwon, Michigan Virtual

This report offers an overview of methods investigating educators’ professional discourse. The selected three methods are text-mining focused on content words, text-mining with function words, and social network analysis. The first method allows summarization of text data based on focal points in corpora. The second type of text-mining leverages predetermined categories of words to investigate psycho-linguistic characteristics behind language use. For the purpose of research on professional discourses, the social network analysis would be a useful tool to observe behaviors of active participants, for instance, facilitating communications. Detailed illustration of procedures of and results from individual methods will help readers strengthen their resources of research methods with these current cutting-edge approaches as they relate to doing social research in general or action research for program improvement.