TY - JOUR
T1 - “Sorry to hear you're going through a difficult time”
T2 - Investigating online discussions of consumer debt
AU - Lawson, Robert
AU - Lutzky, Ursula
AU - Kehoe, Andrew
AU - Gee, Matt
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023
PY - 2023/4/30
Y1 - 2023/4/30
N2 - As recent years have witnessed increasing pressure on personal finances, compounded by the current cost of living crisis, online forums have become an important resource for people dealing with financial precarity. In this article, we offer a corpus linguistic analysis of data from MoneySavingExpert.com, the UK's largest online money management advice forum, studying 207 threads and 41.4 million words of text posted from 2005 to 2021. Through measures of word frequency and word association, we uncover similarities and differences in language use on the debt-free wannabe (DFW) and mortgage-free wannabe (MFW) forums. Our findings show that the DFW forum focuses on interactive exchanges involving requests for help and offers of advice, while the MFW forum is characterised by goal setting and community building. We thus contribute new insights into the discursive construction of debt in digital media and provide further understanding of the role online forums play in supporting vulnerable people.
AB - As recent years have witnessed increasing pressure on personal finances, compounded by the current cost of living crisis, online forums have become an important resource for people dealing with financial precarity. In this article, we offer a corpus linguistic analysis of data from MoneySavingExpert.com, the UK's largest online money management advice forum, studying 207 threads and 41.4 million words of text posted from 2005 to 2021. Through measures of word frequency and word association, we uncover similarities and differences in language use on the debt-free wannabe (DFW) and mortgage-free wannabe (MFW) forums. Our findings show that the DFW forum focuses on interactive exchanges involving requests for help and offers of advice, while the MFW forum is characterised by goal setting and community building. We thus contribute new insights into the discursive construction of debt in digital media and provide further understanding of the role online forums play in supporting vulnerable people.
KW - Debt
KW - Finance
KW - Mortgage
KW - MoneySavingExpert.com
KW - Online forums
KW - Corpus linguistics
UR - https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/14489/
U2 - 10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100056
DO - 10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100056
M3 - Article
SN - 2666-7991
VL - 3
JO - Applied Corpus Linguistics
JF - Applied Corpus Linguistics
IS - 2
M1 - 100056
ER -