Keywords

corpus linguistics, critical theory, discourse analysis, health information technology, inequality, social constructionism, social justice

 

Authors

  1. Trigg, Lisa J. PhD, ARNP

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to study how the Institute of Medicine discourse promoting health information technology may reproduce existing social inequalities in healthcare. Social constructionist and critical discourse analysis combined with corpus linguistics methods have been used to study the subject positions constructed for receivers of healthcare across the executive summaries of 3 different Institute of Medicine reports. Data analysis revealed differences in the way receivers of healthcare are constructed through variations of social action through language use in the 3 texts selected for this method's testing.