MDA by contrast, has an explicit focus on action, rather than discourse, and therefore perhaps has a greater capacity than CDA, and other connected methods to explore how social practices are formed and developed.
Activity Theory, and hence MDA, assumes that all social actions are mediated through tools, external artifacts, or internal processes within the individual.
Researchers and participants can jointly construct sites of engagement, referred to as space-time stations (de Saint-George 2005).
Again this is a narrower definition than is often associated with the term, and Scollon (2001a) himself was critical of what he saw as overuse and simplification of the notion of a community of practice, particularly as popularised in the management literature (for example, see van Winkelen, 2016; Lee & Oh, 2013; McGuire & Garavan, 2013).
MDA scholars typically utilize a set of heuristic Questions and Jones et al. 2017 developed these into a structured analytical pathway to help researchers.
The MDA scholar, de Saint-George (2005) conceptualises practices, mediational means, and people, as having trajectories which intersect at space/time stations; and where sites of engagement can ‘open up’.
The alignment of MDA to the practice perspective, and the need for establishing mediational means partly via a thematic analysis, ensures linkages back to the literature.
The data collection involved in MDA is relatively straightforward, with perhaps the exception of the desirability to record events at the site of engagement, which might result in access issues in some cases.
The first reason is the sheer quantity of analytical resources needed to answer the heuristic questions (outlined in figure 7).
MDA is realized in practice through the research strategy of nexus analysis which is suitable for studying complex, evolving processes in order to shed light on social action not only in situ but also as reaching across long-span timescales.
Examples of studies using nexus analysis have focused on micro perspectives but also on issues on macro level, e.g. when interpreting video diaries produced by children (Iivari et al., 2014), studying popular media as a pervasive educative force (Wohlwend & Medina, 2012), and building an information infrastructure in a city (Halkola et al., 2012), service interaction (Izadi, 2017, 2020).