ADHD en social konstruktion - en diskursanalys om hur ADHD beskrivs och talas om i skolans facktidningar

Sammanfattning: Author: Ditte Edström Title: ADHD a social construction - A discourse analysis on how ADHD is described and communicated in professional school journals [translated title] Supervisor: Anders Lundberg Five percent of all students in Swedish schools have got an ADHD diagnosis (The National Board of Health and Welfare 2014), which is about two children in each class. In ten years, the diagnosed cases among children and adolescents have increased by 700 percent. The purpose of this study was to highlight how ADHD is described, and thereby socially constructed, in Swedish schools using a discourse analytic approach with a social constructivist perspective. The aim was also to investigate what social impacts these constructions could provide. The empirical data consisted of articles from Lärarnas Nyheter – a website where collected journals from unions representing school-professions are published. The analyzed journals are: Pedagogiska Magasinet, Specialpedagogik, Förskolan and Lärarnas Tidning. The analytical tools that the discourse analysis was primarily inspired by were the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. The results showed a medical discourse as being the dominant one when the professionals in the journals were communicating about students with ADHD. The study also showed that both the medical and pedagogical expertise are critical to how schools are organized, they argue that school requirements in general are too high in relation to the students’ abilities. They also argue that schools do not take into account individual differences in maturity witch in some cases may be the cause of students´ difficulties and attention problems. Key words: ADHD, school, social constructionism, discourse analysis