Science in Suomi24 discussion forum: Scientific discussions among public

Authors

• Johanna Kalja-Voima University of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages and Communication Studies

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23997/pk.146485

Keywords:

collocation, corpus-assisted discourse studies, discourse prosody, discussion forum, science

Abstract

This study analyses the discussions about science among Finns on the Suomi24 discussion forum and
describes public perceptions of science. The research question is: What do the discussions reveal about
publics’ views on science’s meaning in society? The research method is corpus-assisted discourse analysis
and the statistical method is collocation analysis. The data consists of a sub-corpus collected from the
Suomi24 corpus from 2001 to 2017. As a node, a Finnish uncombined noun tiede ‘science’ and compound
nouns, e.g. kielitiede ‘linguistics’, was used. The results show that discussions suggest four discourses: 1)
science, society, scientific disciplines and belief systems, 2) doing science, 3) explaining science, and 4)
true and objective science. The findings are in line with previous research, but also provide new insights
into how publics discuss science.