The Centre has two research projects related to the language of chiropractic.

The first is a pilot project in which a corpus of approximately 280,000 words was assembled from the 2005-2008 editions of the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association. This work was supported by funds from Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. As part of the analysis of that pilot chiropractic corpus, keywords were identified by comparison to a corpus of general English. The output from that analysis is available through the link below as an Excel worksheet for interested colleagues to examine.

JCCA versus General English Keyword List

In the worksheet, RC Freq and RC % refer to the number of occurences of the keyword and its percentage prevalence, respectively, in the reference corpus (in this case a corpus of general English extracted from the New York Times). Keyness measures the degree to which the word is over-represented in the chiropractic corpus.

The second study is an analysis of the language of Canadian chiropractic from the period approximately 60 years ago when Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College was founded. This project is supported by the Canadian Chiropractic Historical Association. A manuscript has been prepared and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The paper refers to 4 data sets, listed below, which are available as Excel spreadsheets. These four data sets are:

1. The word list of all types (words) found in the historical chiropractic corpus.
2.  The list of all historical keywords identified by statistical comparison to the modern chiropractic corpus.
3. The list of all concordances (exemplars of usage) of the word adjustment.
4. The list of all concordances (exemplars of usage) of the word subluxation.