The devil in the detail: everyday language as extraordinary data

This webinar explores the usefulness of seeing language itself as research data – the structure and nature of language as a topic of analysis in its own right, capable of revealing significant insight.

Speaker: Gill Ereaut, Founding Partner, Linguistic Landscapes

What you’ll learn:

• An understanding of the basic principles of language analysis and how it differs from other qualitative approaches
• The kind of techniques used and insights that can emerge
• An overview of potential applications and client benefits
• Practical examples to illustrate findings and applications

More than just being a route into how people feel, or a way to collect their views on a subject, analysing the structure and nature of language can provide valuable insight.

This webinar delves into the key principles of this analysis – often termed ‘discourse analysis' – looking at how language constructs social reality.

• In research and insight, it helps you hear what customers are saying differently, and appreciate more fully the world view it stems from.
• In communications, small language choices have a big impact – analysis and subsequent recommendations can help fix a specific issue or support a strategy.
• In organisational culture (where internal language can perpetuate a culture long after it becomes outdated) – analysing it is a powerful way to bring culture to the surface. This helps to explain and thus address persistent business issues, e.g. with customer communications or complaints handling. It is also a powerful way to begin a process of culture change.

Language works subtly but its effects are profound, therefore the risks and opportunities are important to understand. For example, familiar language (of a sector or market, a set of consumers or within a client organisation) both reflects and locks-in a particular world view. It can be hard to break out of these patterns of thinking, but mapping them and making them explicit is the first step to challenge or change.

This webinar looks at language analysis within organisations, including patterns seen in client work – in metaphors, pronouns, formal/informal language and more – across a range of client problems, as well as the implications and actions taken as a result.

It is ideal for researchers and clients who feel language has more to offer than they are currently accessing.