Discursive impressions : a study in the use of a discourse-oriented approach for organizing materials in an online forum on erectile dysfunction.

• Main Author: Heok, Adrian Kay Heng.
• Other Authors: Brendan Luyt
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Philosophy
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50708
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This qualitative study organizes the materials found in an online forum on erectile dysfunction in order to encapsulate and provide an effective and efficient introduction to the multiple discourses that take place within it. In an electronic forum threads are generated from each query or issue made along with the responses that addresses these queries or issues. However, each query or issue may generate additional concerns and questions, which then form new threads of their own. Traditionally such a viral proliferation of ideas and information are not aggregated to provide new users with a quick introduction to the diverse and the often competing ideas found within an electronic forum. The richness of ideas is trapped within its current structure, being effectively reduced to a single title set by the first person that initiated the thread or discussion. In order to liberate and surface these ideas for browsing, changes must be made to traditional conceptions of organization. Sadly, no research has been conducted to date on the organization of materials in electronic forums to facilitate such access to the multiple discussions within. One reason for this is that the field of library and information science has been aligned very much to the positivist model of knowledge and committed itself to a theoretical foundation that places too much emphasis on rationality and order, precision and certainty. As the field of library science makes tentative steps towards a more postmodern epistemology (Radford, 1998), this thesis goads the movement a little further by providing an alternative notion premised on a constructivist perspective. It adopts a discourse-oriented approach using thematic analysis to organise the postings in an electronic forum in order to reveal the multiplicitous voices that are often stifled under single thread titles, making plain the richness of information it contains. A forum on erectile dysfunction was selected as a site for investigation and the materials grouped into clusters based on the various discourses alluded to or referenced with an aim to make the discourses more apparent.