The Discourse on the Coming Out Process in Academic Journals

Abstract

This study involved an examination of the discourse of the coming out process through a corpus linguistic analysis involving keyness and collocation of academic journals. The academic journals include those that cited the Cass’s (1979) and D’Augelli’s (1994) coming out models. A corpus linguistic software program named #Lancsbox 6.0 was utilized to analyze the keywords and collocates of the cited literature related to the two coming out models. The registers for the study and reference corpus were academic writing and the sub-register included peer-reviewed articles. The research questions were created to help identify words used more in articles citing the Cass and D’Augelli models. In addition, we aimed to identify the most common collocations of the term “out” in both the Cass and D’Augelli models. The results indicate the strongest key words were “lesbian,” “out,” and “gay,” “students,” “gender,” and “identities.” The strongest collocates to the word “out” were “coming,” “process,” “their,” “coming,” “conversations,” and “process.” In response to these findings, several implications for counseling and research were developed.