Discourse analysis and psychological adaptation to high altitude hypoxia

Abstract

In order to contribute to the study of psychological adaptation to extreme environments, a discourse analysis was carried out on 10 European lowlanders during a 3‐week scientific expedition under survival conditions at the top of Mount Sajama (6542 m). This discourse analysis was part of a large scientific investigation (involving 12 scientific and medical research procedures) on human adaptation to high altitude chronic hypoxia. The study of discourse was carried out on several freely delivered oral accounts on the same topic, which was always the survival experience itself. This study involved a method developed by Benzécri and Reinert which is partly described in the first part of the article. With this textual analysis technique, it was possible to determine the main word distribution patterns within a discourse and to identify the repetitive language patterns most frequently used. The results on the overall corpus, consisting of the pooled discourses, indicated three specific classes of vocabulary from which three different types of discourse were identified. The data showed that the speaker's discourse did not change during exposure to extreme environmental conditions; the discourse was not correlated with the events but referred only to the speaker himself. The three types of discourse had one main focus: the anxiety, fear or extreme fear (anguish) experienced by all the subjects as psychological states. In response to these feelings, they used various psychological strategies to escape or to face the situation in different ways, as shown by the terms of the different types of discourse. One question which arises about this discourse analysis is: what was tested when the subjects were examined with regard to their psychological acclimatization to altitude? The biological effects of severe chronic hypoxia, or those of stress in response to the fear caused by the extreme environment or/and by psychological adaptation to high altitude.

Discursive Strategies of Subjects With High Altitude Hypoxia: Extreme Environment

“…Moreover, in the ®rst analysis of discourse done on the top of Mount Sajama, these two subjects presented discourse re¯ecting high psychological states of fear and anguish. 10 Two opposing hypotheses may account for the relationship that we observe between the discursive characteristics and a physiological function of adaptation. The ®rst is that a biological handicap may have altered the characteristics of the discourse of subjects S1 and S4 as compared to the other subjects.…”

Textual analysis of internal medicine residency personal statements: themes and gender differences

“…Linguistic analysis of the corpora was performed using two independent contextual analysis software programs, Alceste version 2012 enterprise (Image‐Zafar.com, Toulouse, France) and t‐lab version 9.0 (Franco Lancia, Frosinone, Italy). These programs are widely used for linguistic analysis in the social sciences . Both software applications analyse the corpus as a single document, systematically identifying elementary contextual units (ECUs) embedded in the corpus.…”

“…Recently, large‐scale textual analysis, made possible by advances in computational power and software development, has transformed the field of linguistic analysis. Software packages have been shown to effectively analyse textual data in the social science arenas of political science, psychology, sociology and economics . Such large‐scale data analyses are able to combine thousands of documents and generate reproducible findings and conclusions.…”

The Congressional Debate on Partial-Birth Abortion: Constitutional Gravitas and Moral Passion

“…39 Other approaches employ machine-learning in order to mitigate the costs of human labelling, although they recognize that human intervention to monitor and guide the analysis cannot be avoided. 40 Alceste, the approach used here and elsewhere in the social sciences, 41 does not require any pre-coding but is more limited in that it cannot analyze very large corpora 42 or corpora containing multiple discrete topics. Its chief advantage for the Senate debates on abortion is that it allows the researcher to analyze statistically and spatially the intersection of characteristics of the speakers (e.g., party affiliation, vote on the bill, and ideological rank) with the tendency of those speakers to develop and focus on particular lines of argument.…”