"Sorry to hear you're going through a difficult time": Investigating online discussions of consumer debt

Lawson, Robert and Lutzky, Ursula and Kehoe, Andrew and Gee, Matt (2023) "Sorry to hear you're going through a difficult time": Investigating online discussions of consumer debt. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 3 (2). p. 100056. ISSN 2666-7991

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100056
Dates:	Date Event 21 April 2023 Accepted 30 April 2023 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Debt, Finance, Mortgage, MoneySavingExpert.com, Online forums, Corpus linguistics
Subjects:	CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-02 - English language CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media
Depositing User:	Robert Lawson
Date Deposited:	22 Jun 2023 10:53
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2024 12:08
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/14489

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