Abstract
The chapter outlines the methods and design of the research underpinning the book. The analysis uses The Times archive at the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) research centre at Lancaster University. The chapter discusses data quality and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) issues when studying historical newspapers, the composition of the corpus is divided into 23 subcorpora to keep the large corpus manageable by CQPweb, decisions about collocation windows and measures such as log likelihood (LL) and log ratio (LR). Finally, it outlines the affinity of ‘at’ and ‘risk’ and justifies examining the constructs at the risk, at risk and at-risk separately.
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Notes
- 1.
The Times in the book always stands for The Times (London).
- 2.
CADAAD: Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines.
- 3.
A ‘risk word’ is defined as any lexical item whose root is risk (risking, risky, riskers, etc.) or any adjective or adverb containing this root (e.g. at-risk, risk-laden, no-risk; Zinn and McDonald 2018: 70).
- 4.
- 5.
Due to the Consumer Credit Regulation (SI 1989 No 1125) in the 1990s, advertisements had to include a warning using at risk language (compare Sect. 5.8.6).
- 6.
This also includes cases where up to three words occurred between ‘at’ and ‘risk’ except ‘the’.
- 7.
This also includes expressions where additional words occurred in between such as ‘at the severe risk’, ‘at no risk’ and so on.
- 8.
This is the power to which the number 2 must be raised to obtain the value n: 2x = n. The binary logarithm of 1 is 0, the binary logarithm of 2 is 1, for 4 it is 2, for 8 it is 3, for 64 it is 6, for 128 it is 7 and so on.
- 9.
This means the likelihood of the null hypothesis (in this case, there is no statistically significant difference between the occurrence of a word in the collocation window compared with the rest of the subcorpus of a decade) is being incorrectly rejected.
- 10.
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Zinn, J.O. (2020). ‘At Risk’ Constructs as Research Object: Research Design and Methods. In: The UK ‘at Risk’. Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20238-5_3
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