A review of the conceptual themes in the reports of Iranian Corona National Headquarters: word collocation and communicative strategies based on critical discourse analysis

Following the announcement of Covid-19 as a pandemic. High authorities of world health systems including the Minister of Health in Iran shared their findings and achievements with public through media. The present qualitative study aimed at analyzing the news reports of the minister of Health on Covid-19 focusing on word collocation and discourse and communicative strategies.

This review study was conducted on news reports released from December 11, 2019 till January 20, 2021 (end of the third rise) on Mehr News Agency. The extracted data were chronologically ordered in 316 reports (155800). Then the frequency of the related expressions was checked. The themes were extracted in following six steps using Clark and Braun Model (2013): familiarity with data, encoding, searching the themes, reviewing the themes, introducing and naming the themes, and finally rounding out and writing the final analysis.

The concepts were put in nine categories: clarifying the duties of the Health Ministry, assignment for people, uniting the public forces, hope creation, focusing on the ideological foundations, expressing virtual education methods, using metaphors, expressing international dimensions, and using emotional devices.

The extracted concepts show the efforts of the Iranian Corona National Headquarters to clarify the issue, attract the public cooperation and accompaniment.