Understanding Knowledge Circulation in the Context of Endometriosis: A Comparative Analysis of Keywords and Terms Across Experts, Patient Associations, and the Press
Résumé
Endometriosis is an incurable disease that affects 10-20% women (Ilschner et al. 2022). It is poorly understood by laypeople and certain misrepresentations conveyed by the media can lead to minimizing the severity of the disease (Young et al. 2015, Bullo 2020). At the same time, when terms circulate outside specialized discourses (e.g. through the general press or social media), semantic variations are likely to occur and to contribute to the dissemination of these misrepresentations (Nikitina 2020; Dempster et al. 2022). In the medical field, these processes can have an impact on laypeople’s perception of the diseases (Balfour 2023). In this context, this proposal addresses issues related to the circulation of the terminology of endometriosis in different speech communities, in French. Three speech communities are considered (experts, patient associations, and journalists), whose discourses are gathered in three corpora. From an exploratory perspective, the corpora are compared with keyword and term extraction techniques to identify the most significant lexical differences. Keywords, extracted with AntConc (Anthony 2022), provide an overview of the aboutness of each corpus compared to the others (Scott & Tribble 2006, Egbert & Biber 2019). TermoStat (Drouin 2003) allows to focus more precisely on terminological differences. Results show that certain themes (e.g. fertility, pain) are evenly distributed in the corpora, whereas others (e.g. menstrual poverty, sexism) are specific to the press and the associations corpora. Furthermore, although most of the extracted terms are used in the three corpora, major differences in their distribution point to the coexistence of different viewpoints, or even of competing conceptualizations, in and between the corpora. These observations will be discussed in relation with their impact on laypeople’s understanding of endometriosis, which will provide new insights on the dynamics of term and knowledge circulation in this context, and highlight the role of each community in these processes.