Digital public discourses on antibiotic resistance in Switzerland
Creators: name: Borghoff, Birgitta
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2019
Subjects: Discourse
Discourse analysis
Computer linguistics
Corpus analysis
Antibiotic resistance
Public health
Organizational communication
Health communication
Public storytelling
Topic modeling
401.4: Terminologie, Diskursanalyse, Pragmatik

description: Patterns of Language Use in Public Stories about Antibiotics and Resistances in Digital Discourses

In the domain of public health communication (Baumann; Lampert & Grimm; Camerini, Ludolph & Rothenfl-uh; Hurrelmann & Baumann; Rossmann & Hastall), the communicative areas of tension to which governance practices are inevitably exposed in the modern public sphere manifest themselves to a particular degree. These include different perspectives on the perception and evaluation of problem situations, different patterns of interpretation with regard to the validity of knowledge and procedures of problem solving (e.g. Stirling, p. 269). In addition, there is a change in the framework conditions for doctor-patient communication, in particular due to the increase in the significance of digital communication environments (Hannawa & Rothenfluh; Altendorfer).

The poster illuminates questions of public health prevention from the point of view and with the methods of linguistic, corpus-driven discourse analysis (Spitzmüller & Warnke; Bubenhofer b). It is based on two research projects commissioned by the Swiss health authorities which were carried out between 2017 and 2019 and were based on an extensive digital text corpus (Stücheli-Herlach et al., pp. 8-9). The focus was on the question of the linguistically formed "common sense" on the subject of antibiotic resistance. In public dis-courses the research team examined manifest controversies (e.g. Dascal) as well as possible discourse coalitions among relevant actors of health communication (e.g. Hajer) on the basis of significant recursive patterns of language use (Bubenhofer a).

Specifically, the "Strategy Antibiotic Resistance StAR" of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) was discussed. The research team examined corresponding antibiotic and antibiotic resistance discourses in German and French, using a German-language corpus of 133 web sources with 1.9 million individual texts and 839 million words as well as a French-language corpus of 149 web sources with 16,000 individual texts and 21.9 million words. The results concern indications for thematic discourse clusters, frequencies of context markers, keyword analyses, the mutual relation of discourse actors in networks as well as references to "public stories" (Arnold et al.) on the relevant topics. All results (were determined in multi-stage quantitative and qualitative analysis processes and triangulated in an interdisciplinary research team (Dreesen & Stücheli-Herlach). 

The poster presents the most important methods and results and presents practical conclusions for discussion. Special attention will be given to the transfer of discourse-linguistic insights to actors of professional practice by means of interactive, digital data visualizations. The results were used for the further implementation and optimisation of the "StAR" project of public health promotion.