Membership categorisation analysis

Karin Idevall Hagren
Uppsala University
Table of contents

Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) is an approach to gain knowledge about how social and moral order is performed and made sense of in the everyday activities of people (Housley & Fitzgerald 2009, Fitzgerald & Housley 2015). More specifically, MCA is used for the empirical analysis of explicit and implicit categorisation in language – spoken or written – and the close examination of how categories are described, how they go together in collections, so called Membership Categorisation Devices (MCD), how they pair up with other categories, for example as contrasting or standardized relational pairs, and how they perform social norms telling us how members of certain categories should behave.

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