While adult health communication has been studied extensively, research into adolescent health communication has been somewhat neglected. In this ten-chapter interdisciplinary volume, Kevin Harvey deftly combines complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to identify discursive patterns in young people's health-related questions and anxieties.
The opening chapter introduces the project and outlines the structure of the book. In chapter 2 the author reviews some of the problems that have been shown in past studies to affect communication between teenagers and health professionals in face-to-face interaction, for example, concerns regarding confidentiality. Kevin Harvey explains that the recent provision of internet health websites has allowed adolescents to seek advice in their own time and space. The interactive platforms afford anonymity, invisibility, and asynchronicity, and thus encourage disinhibited communication. The data forming the corpus for this study is drawn from one such website (teenagehealthfreak.org).
Chapter 3 contextualises the research by providing an overview of current issues relating to adolescent sexual and mental health from linguistic, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological perspectives. This is followed by chapter 4, which introduces the corpus approach to discourse analysis, highlighting some of its advantages, such as the potential to identify quite subtle, minority discourses in addition to hegemonic ones. The author then describes in detail the specific steps taken when doing corpus analysis—word frequency lists (Wordlists), keywords, collocation, and concordance.
Chapters 5 through 9 are analytical chapters that present the results of the corpus methods applied, offering discussion and interpretation. Chapter 5 compares the data with the British National Corpus and, using keyword analysis, provides an indication of the main themes in the teenagers' emails—sexual health and mental health concerns. Chapters 6–9 focus more narrowly on the aforementioned themes. Chapter 6 analyses the keyword sex and identifies, for example, the ‘male-sex drive’ discourse, which positions women as objects of male desire. Chapter 7 focuses on HIV and AIDS, revealing confusion about these two conditions and the ways in which they might be contracted.
Chapter 8 shifts the focus from sexual to mental health, analysing discourses surrounding self-harming and suicide. Crucially, the adolescents' emails highlight the common problem of communication, whereby the teenagers fear the consequences of sharing their feelings with others, afraid that they would be faced with hostility or indifference. In chapter 9, the author specifically investigates the words depressed and depression and finds that the contributors tend to use two formulations that embed the ways in which they may perceive their state: ‘I am depressed’ and ‘I have depression’. The former implies a reaction to a temporary situation such as exams or relationship break-ups, whereas the latter typically draws on a discourse of medicalisation of emotional distress, which limits to some extent the contributors' agency. Concluding the book, chapter 10 summarises the findings, outlines some limitations of the methodology, and offers potential implications for healthcare.
As the research is interdisciplinary in nature, the book will appeal to linguists, health communication researchers, and practitioners. The corpus linguistics methods and terminology are clearly explained so that even readers new to this field can engage easily with the topic.
