Functional Discourse Analysis (FDA)

At HFAL, the underlying theme of all our work is Functional Discourse Analysis. This ‘key tool’ involves the analysis of naturally occurring discourse and is used in many of the services we provide. If you are interested in the motives, intentions and perceptions of people, you have to analyse what they say. Our expertise lies in making sense of what individuals say and making predictions from this. To date, HFAL have used FDA in the railway, nuclear (MOD/Rolls Royce), health, social policy and consumer insight sectors. The method is intensive but reveals things currently unavailable by the use of other methods. HFAL is currently developing software solutions to make FDA taxonomies and analysis more widely available.

Why FDA is such an informative and invaluable tool

Frequently in any industry, the information on an issue, attitude or something similar takes the form of questionnaires, verbal interviews and/or technical reports with those involved. The fundamental flaw regarding this means of data analysis is that people in Western culture are extremely familiar with questionnaires and investigative interviews; subsequently they know what the best ways are to answer the questions in order to give a certain impression, divert blame, or achieve some other aim.

Functional discourse analysis (FDA) tackles this problem by transferring or transcribing the verbal material into a discourse analysis data base, and categorising data. This allows us to look for statistical relationships between what people say and what they do, or what happens. So instead of simply accepting literally the surface meanings of conversations and verbal statements, the hidden meanings emerge in terms of replicable mathematical relationships between what people say and what actually happens. Causal models underlying particular clusters of events are then revealed. Things emerge from FDA that cannot be discovered simply by listening to words.

Key Tools: Incident Reporting
Key Tools: Critical Thinking Race Test

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