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Article published In: The Quality of Quantity, the Quantity of Quality
Edited by Steven Schoonjans
[Nota Bene 2:1] 2025
► pp. 131–166

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Solidarity in giving

Tracing shifts in discourse on organ donation through the lens of qualitative and quantitative methods

 | Universität Zürich
 | Philipps-Universität Marburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Zurich.

Published online: 26 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nb.00026.ven
Abstract
Quantitative approaches are increasingly applied in traditionally qualitative linguistic subdisciplines, such as discourse analysis in German studies. Building on Angermüller’s definition of German discourse analysis, which integrates hermeneutics, pragmatics, and structuralism, and aligning with Foucault’s discourse theory, this paper explores the challenges and synergies of combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We examine discourses on organ donation in Germany using temporal word embeddings and topic modeling alongside qualitative analysis to detect trends and discursive shifts. The study highlights themes of individual autonomy and societal solidarity, with proponents advocating legal obligations to enhance democratic legitimacy and opponents emphasizing bodily autonomy while critiquing enforced solidarity. Analyzing linguistic strategies in German media, Bundestag debates and publications of interest groups since 1990, we offer insights into the evolving public discourse on organ donation. The combination of quantitative tools and qualitative analyses demonstrates the complementarity of both approaches in understanding discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief introduction to German (Linguistic) Discourse Analysis
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Distributional semantics
      • 3.1.1Collocations
      • 3.1.2Identifying changes through word embeddings
    • 3.2Corpus creation and annotation
      • 3.2.1Using BERTopic to create an annotation corpus
      • 3.2.2Manual annotation
  • 4.Corpus
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1An introduction to transplantation and organ donation discourse in Germany
    • 5.2Recurring themes within our corpus
      • 5.2.1Coercion
      • 5.2.2Opt-out solution
    • 5.3Solidarity in discourse on organ donation
  • 6.Discussion of the qualitative and quantitative methods
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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