Methodology for the Study of Nationalist Discourse in a Multi-Ethnic Environment

This article reviews the main methodological approaches to the study of the discourse of nationalism in multi-ethnic societies that exist in international research practice.

Aim. Purpose is to review the existing approaches to the study of nationalist discourse in modern research, their advantages and disadvantages.

Tasks. Objectives are to determine what are the current methods for the study of nationalist discourse in the scientific environment, to examine the limitations of their implementation, to identify the most promising approaches, to specify what are the advantages and disadvantages of the used methodological approaches.

Methods. The comparative analysis method was applied to determine the advantages and disadvantages of the methodological approaches to study the discourse of nationalism. The article also used the method of bibliographic data analysis in order to deepen the understanding of the existing methodological approaches to the study of the discourse of nationalism by searching and studying scientific materials and works of scientists.

Results. The article deals with the quantitative and qualitative methods to study the nationalist discourse in multi-ethnic environment, the difficulties and limitations of the implementation of these or those methods, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Special attention was paid to the method of content analysis of social networks and blogosphere, since today the study of sentiments in social networks is gaining importance, due to the increasing breadth of audience coverage in different countries as well as the emergence of new formats of citizen participation, such as online participation.

Conclusions. Today, the discourse related to nationalist sentiments is most prevalent in internet, for a number of reasons, including the speed and ease of presenting information and the horizontal connectivity. Therefore, in multi-ethnic societies, great importance should be given to scrutinising content on social media including the use of ‘hate speech’. In this regard, the paper makes recommendations for analysing the information space and strengthening work in this direction.

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