"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 | ||||||
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| Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100056 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| 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 |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > School of English | ||||||
| Depositing User: | Robert Lawson | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jun 2023 10:53 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 22 Jun 2023 10:53 | ||||||
| URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/14489 |
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