A thematic analysis content linguistic of suicide note analysis of notes case study of 30 samples in Mashhad

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Omid Darbar ¹
• Hamidreza Mirzajani ²
• Abas Sheikholeslami ³
• Azam Estaji ⁴

¹ PhD Student, Department of Law, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran

² Assistant, Department of Law, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran (Corresponding Author)

³ Associate, Department of Law, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran

⁴ Associate, Department of Linguistics, Ferdowsi University Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jlkd.2022.71063.1040

Abstract

Since suicide notes are the only reliable documents in suspicious deaths named as suicide in special branches, determining whether they are real or fake may play undeniable role in recognition of murder and subsequent judicial decisions in initial stages. The question is that “what approaches except common ones such as fake, handwriting as well as signature expertise can be used to recognize fake or real notes in our country with experimental history than scientific”? Since content notes are filled with words and phrases called “linguistic inputs”, legal linguistics can be considered internationally alongside with other sciences as forensic medicine and forensic psychiatry and its findings in legal fields indicates a new and scientific approach in determining fake or real notes.In this paper, we are going to identify more repeatable contents in notes by analyzing 30 real notes using Brown& Clark thematic analysis and test the findings by Binomial test to introduce more repeatable and generalizable contents as distinctive features of real notes.

Keywords

• Legal Linguistics
• Thematic Analysis
• Theme
• Suicide Note
• Braun
• V
• & Clarke

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