Cultural Models Analysis

Cultural models analysis is a discourse-analytic method for reconstructing the shared, largely tacit cognitive schemas — the cultural models — that organize how members of a group understand a domain such as marriage, success, or illness. Rather than asking people to state their models directly (they usually cannot), the analyst examines what speakers say spontaneously: the key words they reach for, the metaphors they reason with, and the assumptions their arguments take for granted. Recurring patterns across many speakers' talk are taken as traces of an underlying schema that the talk presupposes but never fully spells out.