As a research methodology or tactic, critical discourse analysis (CDA)

An interdisciplinary method called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to investigate language in social circumstances. It is regarded as a research methodology or plan that incorporates a variety of academic fields, ideas, and investigational techniques. To examine language use and its consequences on power relations and social structures, CDA often uses a variety of texts and even methodologies. As a result, it can be applied to a variety of qualitative research approaches, including case studies, ethnographies, phenomenologies, and others that analyze language use and its social environment.

Critical discourse analysis is its own self-contained method. Textbooks which list a limited number of methods and strategies (e.g., case study, grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenology, etc.) do not have enough space to list every possible approach to qualitative research.

That's a really good question. CDA doesn't fit neatly into one specific methodology like case study, grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenology, etc. Instead, CDA is a methodological framework or an analytical tool that can be integrated into various qualitative research approaches to help uncover the ideological/ intertextual dimensions of language use.

For instance, if you're conducting an ethnographic study where you're immersing yourself in a particular socio-cultural context, you could use CDA to analyse the narratives that emerge from that context, helping you understand how a particular ideology is communicated and negotiated within that community.

Similarly, you can use CDA as part of a grounded theory approach to help you generate theories about how an ideology emerges and is perpetuated within the discourse. E.g., CDA could guide the coding and analysis process within the grounded theory methodology.

And if you're doing a case study that involves analysing texts (e.g., newspapers, fiction literature, speeches of political leaders, policy documents) to understand a certain ideology, you can use CDA as the analytical approach too. This combination would allow you to explore how the ideology is present and enacted within specific cases.

Critical Discourse Analysis aims to explore power dynamics of a particular discourse or discourses in a given situation. It is more than a linguistic analysis that focuses on use of language in the construction of a particular discourse. CDA focuses on who is the intended beneficiary of a particular discourse. CDA is generally used with case study. For example, if we want to explore who will be advantaged if we use the discourse of climate change in stead of global warming etc..

Ajit Singh David L Morgan Anna Kuteleva Muhammad Nadeem Dogar I am grateful to you for taking the time to respond; your explanations are very insightful and helpful. I understand the issue better now.

CDA is an analytical tool that can be used or be integrated into various quantitative research approaches to uncover intertextual dimensions.