Expressing expertise and using intertextual references in online forums

Unlike the patients who post questions on healthcare websites set up by health professionals (see Adolphs et al., 2004; Harvey et al., 2007; Atkins and Harvey, 2010; Seale et al., 2010;

Harvey, 2012; Harvey, Locher and Mullany, 2013), the parents who post questions on the JABS message board and forum have not set out to gain information from medical experts.

They are aware that they are consulting their peers. However, they do so on the implicit understanding that members of their peer group possess a kind of expertise which they value.

This reflects a shift in the notion of expertise and a blurring of the boundaries between the expert and the lay-person which is increasingly recognised in popularization studies. The early view of the process of popularization as one in which scientific knowledge is communicated in a simplified form by the ‘expert’ to a ‘lay’ person, who possesses no technical expertise at all, has been widely challenged (Hilgartner, 1990; Grundman and Cavaillé, 2000; Myers, 2003). To begin with, ‘experts become less expert as soon as they step outside their very limited specialism’ (Myers, 2003: 268). Furthermore, ‘lay’ people may possess considerable technical expertise in a certain field, whether because they have undertaken training or research or simply through lived experience (ibid.: 268-269). They therefore have their own persuasive resources which they can draw on (ibid.). The writers on the JABS website possess a variety of types of expertise. Almost all are parents. Some have the experience of living with a disabled child. Some have medical or scientific expertise. But what must not be overlooked is that, as members of a vaccine-critical group, many JABS members actively seek to enhance their own knowledge and expertise through a variety of

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means. In vaccine-critical discourse, a common persuasive strategy is to emphasise the expertise of the individual parent (Hobson-West, 2005).

When people engage in debate, whether face-to-face, for example in focus groups, or online, they adopt particular strategies for claiming an entitlement to speak and establishing

credibility. Participants in focus groups often support their claims by referring to specific sources but have also been found to attribute claims to non-specific sources, using, for example, the generic pronouns you or they, or to refer to hypothetical sources (Myers, 2004:

135-142). In newsgroups and online forums, there is an obvious need to express a warrant for expertise, since the issues at stake are highly technical (Richardson, 2003). Richardson (ibid.) identifies five warranting strategies used in newsgroups. The most common strategy involves reference to sources (mass media; science publications; policy publications; industry

statements). In MMR newsgroups, a range of sources were used to support claims, including web pages, publications by bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or lobby groups, but by far the greatest number of references were to mass media publications (Richardson, 2005: 154). References are frequently specific but sometimes vague, for example, ‘I saw a report recently …’, or generic, for example, references to ‘the media’ (ibid.: 153). While there is a general reliance on mass media sources, people often express negative evaluations of them (ibid.). Richardson (2005) does not correlate the use of reference to sources with the writer’s stance, but Hodson-Champeon (2010) reports that newsgroup posters tend to use a direct quotation or make some other explicit reference to a source when they are rebutting another’s claim. When they use reference to support their own claims, they tend not to refer to their sources explicitly. The participants on the JABS forum are not all of one mind, though, and disagreement is common.

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Some of the interaction on the JABS forum exhibits some of the features uncovered by Vayreda and Antaki (2011) in their analysis of a forum thread discussing the necessity, or otherwise, to vaccinate against the H1N1 virus. Participants often disqualified the

contributions of others by challenging their expertise, challenging the quality of their sources, or on the grounds that they were partial and had interests in the pharmaceutical industry.

Another frequently used warranting strategy is that of drawing upon personal experience (Richardson, 2003: 178-179). This strategy is found frequently in the JABS corpus where parents often supply a narrative to allow them a warrant for raising a topic or use their child’s experience as evidence in support of an argument. Narratives are diverse in form and content, but keyword analysis can be used in a corpus-assisted study to highlight candidate terms (Sealey, 2010). Likely candidate terms in the JABS corpus are OCCUR and HAPPEN. Other warranting devices identified by Richardson (2003: 179-180) concern referring to one’s status (for example, stating that one is a scientist) and using a technical register, for example, using specialized vocabulary or the sorts of grammatical features typical of scientific writing, such as nominalization, pre-modified noun groups, or higher than average lexical density. Where no explicit warrant is provided, a disclaimer of expertise is often given, such as, I’m not a scientist or anything special, but … (ibid.: 181). A disclaimer may indicate that the writer is aware of their own lack of expertise or it may function as a rhetorical device, indicating that technical expertise is not called for to be able to express a valid opinion on a subject. Writers also often challenge others on the lack of sources cited or the credibility of the sources they have used and occasionally respond to challenges by defending their sources (ibid.: 182-183).

Strategies such as these are powerful persuasive resources and are evident in the JABS data.

49 2.3.4 Conclusion to Section 2.3

• Public debate today is structured more around group identities and shard issues than it was in the past and the MMR debate, and the activities of the JABS group, is typical of such a change;

• It is increasingly recognised that ‘lay’ people have their own forms of expertise (often rooted in personal experience) and their own discursive resources on which they can draw;

• Although the boundaries between scientific and popularized genres are increasingly recognized as fuzzy, it is still acknowledged that when scientific claims move from their source domain and are reproduced in other genres, they undergo shifts in meaning, expressed through particular lexico-grammatical and rhetorical changes:

such shifts often result in making claims seem more certain than they are in their original form; however, nominalization often carries over from the source domain;

• Public discourse about science has undergone discursive changes in recent years so that issues are framed more as political or public policy issues and scientific detail is backgrounded; public discourse about science draws on and contributes to an

interdiscursive memory bank;

• Forum interactants establish credibility by using particular warranting strategies, such as drawing on personal experience, drawing on technical expertise (for example, using features of scientific discourse) or referring to sources to support their claims;

participants in online newsgroups were found to rely particularly on mass media sources to support claims.

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2.4 Conclusion

This chapter has reviewed literature on the expression of attitudes towards risk and the MMR vaccine, as well as considering ways in which notions of risk and causation are expressed in discourse. It has looked at the strategies used by vaccine-critical groups. It has also looked at theories concerning scientific popularization. It has brought to light the fact that long-held distinctions between experts and non-experts do not always stand up to scrutiny. Lay people have a degree of expertise and particular persuasive resources on which to draw. In the case of discussion of risk in online discussion forums, these include the use of certain warranting devices and intertextual resources. Vaccine-critical groups, in particular, emphasize the expertise of the parent. It has also been found that one cannot easily categorize ways of talking about risk into a binary division between lay and expert, or technical, talk. Instead, the meanings of risk shift according to context. Similarly, there are no clear boundaries between scientific and popularized or lay discourse. While there are certain distinctions, some lexico-grammatical patterns typical of scientific discourse carry over into popularizations. However, it is suggested that vaccine-critical groups exploit scientific discourse and technical risk discourse. They also make strategic use of the connection between risk and trust. Having considered research into MMR, popularization discourse, the next chapter discusses the principles of and approaches to corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. It also discusses approaches to examining evaluation in discourse.

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