Mass Comm EXAM 3 Pray 4 me

The third value, voice, is most important for critical communication studies. Voice is how we make ourselves heard in a democratic society. If our voice is never heard (or if we are never represented in research, by the media, or in organizations), it is as though we do not exist

Critical scholars, in particular, prioritize questions such as, Who can and cannot speak here? What is said and not said here? Who benefits?

Conversation analysts' explanatory claims and their strict reliance on the empirical evidence (i.e., conversational recordings and transcripts) make CA fit nicely with the assumptions of quantitative social science. But the way conversation analysts use inductive reasoning to see patterns in talk also resonates with the methods of humanistic scholars.

For ethnographers and discourse analysts, "the question of how things work is replaced by the question of what things mean . . .; we are interested in how and why the social world comes to have the meanings that it does". Thus, ethnography and discourse analyses better fit the assumptions of the interpretive and/or critical paradigms

Ethnographers combine open coding with in vivo coding to categorize their evidence.

In vivo codes use members' own terms to refer to patterns in talk or texts. Write your codes directly onto interview transcripts, field notes, policy documents, or other texts. You can use highlighting, note card sorting, or a spreadsheet to organize your open and in vivo codes into categories.

At the second level, you will take your interpretive claim beyond merely describing practices and relationships to understanding what those practices and relationships mean to participants in a specific context. At this level, you will have to address the frameworks or schemes that communicators use to assign meanings. As you explore the process of constructing communication meanings in a particular group, place, and time, your research will help others to appreciate what is being accomplished through that communication and how it is accomplished.

This is a good time to mention that your definition of context might be relatively large, thinking of communication across multiple settings and over time. Or you could study a smaller, more local and temporal context.

When there is no situationally appropriate ploy for taking notes, you can withdraw or be shielded for moments to record notes if you retreat to "supply closets, bathroom stalls, and parked cars"

Two key problems with eavesdropping are the ethics of deception and whether participants will change their communication if they sense they are being observed

As you conduct your initial participant observations in the field setting, think about how you might be open and transparent with those participants about your ethnographic project

We mentioned eavesdropping earlier: In what circumstances would you find eavesdropping on other people's communication an acceptable practice? If you were eavesdropping during an initial field observation, for example, at what point would you share your motivations for selecting that setting with those informants? If your study was funded, would you let participants know that? Would you use some of your funding to benefit participants

Focusing on macro-level Discourse necessarily limits your ability to analyze the complexities of language choice that people might make in their local contexts

+Discourse Analytic Claims+ If you are looking for the claim in a published DA study, try looking for the author's indication of purpose, central assertion, or perhaps a clearly labeled research question. You can infer a DA claim from the abstract, but the authors will elaborate their claim more specifically in the first one or two sections of their research report or critical essay.

+Interpreting and Evaluating Ideologies+ An ideology is a group's system of beliefs and values. Debate also privileges competition as a way of vetting ideas and arguments (independence, marketplace of ideas). Valuing participation and believing that the best ideas will win are ideological structures that undergird debate. We cannot really understand a debate without understanding those values and beliefs. We must consider both levels, the everyday social practice and its ideological underpinnings, to make sense of a debate.

+Discourse Analytic Evidence+ If you aim to interpret and evaluate social realities at a certain time and place, it makes no sense to randomly select evidence.

In all likelihood, disengaging from your field research will be a process that happens over time. For example, your official observations may cease by agreement between you and your key informants, but unofficial reflections will still come to you in the setting long afterward. Perhaps you will continue to interact with participants on topics unrelated to your research project. Or you may invite group members to read and respond to your interview transcripts, a report of your interpretations of the group's communication practices, or some prose or poetry based on your data collection in that setting (see the warrants section of this chapter for more on member checks and performance checks, both forms of negative case analysis). In any case, exiting the field of human relationships is every bit as delicate and important as entering that field. For ethnographic researchers, both access and exit require serious attention and care. Morse (1998) advised that it is time to exit the field when one of two things happens: either you recognize that you are putting other goals ahead of the research or you realize you have reached theoretical saturation. You will need to continually analyze evidence to know when you have reached theoretical saturation (i.e., nothing new to learn). This is a good time to elaborate on analytic strategies for ethnography.

+Analyzing Ethnographic Evidence+ case studies, narrative accounts of the communication practices in a particular setting and among specific participants

Case studies are especially useful to ethnographers who intend to apply their findings to improve communication in field settings. Consistent with an interpretive paradigm view of truths as subjective and composed of multiple realities, ethnographers tend to view incongruencies among cases as illustrative, not just problematic. While we are thinking about contradictions, let us turn to some of the ethical issues you will need to navigate in your ethnographic research.

+Ethical Issues for Ethnographers+ the four rights of research participants: to freely choose to participate in research, to maintain some level of privacy, to be treated honestly, and to be kept free from harm. It is your obligation as a researcher to protect these rights while you are participating with members in a field setting over a long time and later, when you represent their communication in your manuscript, performance, or conference presentation

As such, performance ethnographers are always consuming and producing texts. Since both textual consumption and production are power-laden activities, both require reflexivity

+Ethnographic Evidence+ , --Sources-- A defining characteristic of ethnographic research is that "the investigator goes into the field, instead of bringing the field to the investigator". As you participate with and observe communicators in field settings, you will always work to represent communication from their point of view. In the course of observing and interviewing, you may find artifacts or other texts that are important to cultural members.

If you are doing EOS, you may want to have a copy of Hymes's (1974a) SPEAKING mnemonic with you during observations or interviews. You can use it to remind you to notice things about the participants, events, acts, and so forth. If you are doing performance ethnography, you may want to have with you some outline of the scenes that you intend to develop from your data collection (Denzin, 2003; Madison, 2005). The important thing is to give yourself enough of a guide to focus your interviews but not so much as to override the direction your key informants suggest for your conversation. Ethnographers often combine participant-observations and interviews with analysis of archival documents or cultural artifacts. Let's briefly consider each of these sources of ethnographic evidence next.

+Archival Documents+ Archival documents are written or symbolic records of cultural communication such as letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, billboards, or policy documents. The archival texts used for ethnographic research are usually texts that you encounter while participating and observing in a field setting. Sometimes, archival documents are implicated in the talk or actions of the participants you are observing; at other times, those documents give you the background information you need to reconstruct past events or processes that are not available for you to observe.

Finally, reform claims pose particular ethical dilemmas for ethnographic researchers . Namely, your presence affects the lives of your research participants for better or worse.

+Ethnographic Warrants+ You already know that ethnographers value subjectivity and rich description. But valuing subjectivity does not mean that anything goes. Some ethnographic interpretations will be more credible and plausible than others. So, we will reiterate some of the ways that you can demonstrate your credibility and show that your interpretations of the evidence you analyzed are plausible. If your ethnographic project includes claims of evaluation and reform (most likely for autoethnography and performance ethnography), you also will need to consider your study's likely impact, or how your work might change others' awareness of cultural communication or improve intercultural interactions.

In practice, it is impossible to suggest reform without making some evaluation first. That is why we place claims of evaluation and reform together in this section. You will find evaluation and reformist claims in critical ethnographies and critical discourse analyses, as well as in structural and poststructural communication criticism (e.g., both feminist and cultural studies include practitioners who embrace structural criticism, but both lines of work also include scholars whose work better fits poststructural criticism.

+Evidence for Interpretive and Critical Arguments+ Because interpretive and critical communication scholars are concerned with questions of meaning and evaluation (rather than questions of degree, magnitude, or frequency), they prefer the word evidence to the term data.

Triangulating textual sources, and tracing the connections among them, will help you evaluate social realities that are larger than individual conversations (i.e., micro to meso and macro levels, or discourses linked to Discourses). In doing so, you will construct a convincing account of how meaning operates in a particular context. Once you have collected an initial sample of talk and/or texts, you will have to determine a unit of talk to focus on for your analysis.

+Choosing a Unit of Analysis+ As we mentioned earlier, units of analysis are the segments of talk or text that you will code, or group into categories, during data analysis Your DA units might be phrases, sentences, paragraphs, stories, accounts, jokes, or entire conversations or interviews. Until you know what unit you will use, you cannot begin to code your evidence, which is the next step in conducting DA.

No matter how you do it, you must carefully record notes during and immediately following your participant-observations, or much of what you observed will be lost. Add to those notes your write-ups from interviews and notes in which you analyze any artifacts or archival documents that you collect. Your ability and motivation to record detailed notes and organize them so as to retrieve them later and be able to make sense of them is vital to doing good ethnographic research.

+Exiting the Field+ When you participate with and observe members of a group or culture for months or years, you are likely to develop a variety of relationships with group members, assuming that you did not already have those relationships prior to beginning your study. So, the idea of exiting the field, as it has been traditionally called in anthropological research, is more complicated than just closing your notebook after writing your last field note and then not returning for any additional observations or interviews

Add to your verbatim transcripts your summaries of what was said at what point, your tentative ideas, early bits of analysis, and notes on methodological difficulties. You also can make notes on the transcript about artifacts you encountered during participant-observations or the ones your key informants refer to in their interviews. Alternately, you can keep separate memos about the interviews, observations, artifacts, and texts that you analyze. You can use memos to track your initial hunches about what some evidence might mean, and they are especially useful when you triangulate multiple data sources, investigators, and sites over a long period. If you track your feelings about participants, experiences, and findings, you will be better able to bracket your own feelings (if interpreting from an emic view) or acknowledge your standpoint more fully and faithfully (if evaluating from a critical perspective). Finally, memos can help you connect theoretic concepts to your evidence.

+Coding and Reducing Field Notes+ At some point, you must face the daunting task of reducing large amounts of evidence and analysis so that you can report, perform, or otherwise represent the cultural communication you have studied.

When you triangulate sources of evidence, settings, researcher viewpoints (or all those things), you must consider time management and other pragmatic issues in collecting ethnographic evidence.

+Collecting Ethnographic Evidence+ Ethnographic research is iterative: You will work through cycles of collecting and analyzing evidence until you reach theoretical saturation and have coherent, plausible interpretations of communication in that setting or situation. This means working with a lot of evidence over a long time. So, you must think about the issue of time management at the beginning of your project. You will need to allow extra time to develop skills you do not already have, since things go more slowly the first few times, whether it is interviewing, transcribing, taking notes, coding data, or writing reports and performance material.

It is worth restating here that interpretive and critical scholars operate inductively. So, you may start your DA project by selecting some evidence, and you may not know your exact claim at the start of your project. Maybe you have noticed something interesting about a type of text (discourse genre), an interactional accomplishment, or an ideology that motivates you to do DA. If so, you will work to develop a claim that interprets or evaluates what that d/Discourse means and perhaps how those meanings came to exist in a particular context. Or, you might begin your project with some hunch or theory about how a social practice, role, or entity was created in discourse. Either way, remember Phillips and Hardy's (2002) advice from Figure 14.1: Consider which talk and texts are most important, used by the most powerful actors, and distributed most widely. You will want to purposefully select those talk and texts for your DA study.

+Collecting Samples of Language-in-Use+ As you already know, your DA study may include naturally occurring conversations, as well as other kinds of interactive discourse that are not conversational, such as individual or focus group interviews (e.g., Babineau et al., 2017; Bute, 2013, LeGreco, 2012) or participant-observations (see Chapter 13, "Ethnography," for more). If you are going to collect communicative interactions for your DA study, please review Chapter 12, "Interviews and Focus Groups," for advice about conducting interviews, and Chapter 10, "Conversation Analysis," for advice about recording and transcribing interactions. You may be able to access interactive discourse in some existing archive (e.g., tweets, chatroom talk, social media wall posts and commentary, emails, film dialog, or a conversational database). Your DA evidence might include texts that are not interactive, such as news stories, novels, photographs, policy documents, memes, or other symbolic artifacts like hairstyle or clothing choices. "This does not mean that discourse analysts are uninterested in specific conversational activities, or their sequential contexts; rather, their interest is not restricted to that level of action".You can connect this idea to meso-level DA. In fact, triangulating multiple sources of evidence is common for discourse analysts. If you claim to evaluate a discourse genre, an interactional accomplishment, or an ideology, you cannot focus on just one source of textual data, like a conversational transcript. Instead, you must "refer to bodies of texts because it is the interrelations between texts, changes in texts, new textual forms, and new systems of distributing texts that constitute a discourse over time"

As you think about the amount of time needed for your project, consider some of the tasks you will have to accomplish. You will be entering a site of data collection; spending days, weeks, or months at the site; writing up and coding interview transcripts; conducting a literature review; analyzing data within and across cases; writing up notes from site visits and interviews; holding weekly meetings with other researchers (if applicable); and writing interim and final reports, or performances.

+Gaining Access to the Setting+ According to Schwartzman (1993), "stepping into a setting for the first time is probably the most significant phase of the entire ethnographic process" (p. 49). "Everything counts," noted Goodall (1989, p. xv, as cited in Schwartzman, 1993). Ethnographers sometimes refer to the period prior to gaining access as casing the scene (Lindlof & Taylor, 2018, p. 115) to collect some initial impressions of the setting and the participants. You will already have some idea that this setting and your timing are appropriate, but your initial observations may change your idea of whether the study you have in mind is feasible.

Critical communication scholars aim to give voice to people who are underrepresented in the current societal discourse and to liberate those people from the bonds of ideological oppression (i.e., liberation through awareness).

+Inductive Reasoning as a Form of Argument+ The form of reasoning used is one of the main differences between quantitative social scientists and interpretive and critical scholars in communication. In quantitative social science, using deductive reasoning allows you to arrive at precise, objective conclusions after examining a larger number of cases and to generalize from those cases to entire populations of messages or people. The reality you aim to explain and/or predict is objectively verifiable and does not depend much on the context of communication.

+Discourse Analytic Warrants+ The quality of discourse analytic research is warranted using standards from the interpretive and critical paradigms. Given the interpretive paradigm values of subjectivity and rich description and the process of triangulation, DA scholars have various ways of demonstrating their credibility as researchers and the plausibility of their interpretations.

+Researcher Credibility+ Your credibility in doing DA depends on your training and experience, your degree of membership in the context you study, and your faithfulness. Because DA studies triangulate multiple samples of talk and text, faithfulness and degree of membership will be the most important contributors to your credibility in your first few DA studies. You may not have a lot of training or experience doing DA, but you can be a faithful and skilled interviewer or participant-observer if you use those strategies to collect evidence. You can review all the theories you know about and use your theoretical sensitivity to help you create themes from your open codes.

+Interpreting Interactional Accomplishments+ Instead of interpreting and evaluating one type of talk or text, you may want to explore how people accomplish certain functions over time and across many different interactions. How do we accomplish social practices, ways of doing things with others, like debating, being polite, teasing, or gossiping? How do we perform our roles in a certain context, as students, teachers, workers, or parents? Across contexts, how do we perform our identities, that is, our social group memberships? Finally, how do entities—things, objects, or persons—come to have their meanings through interaction (Phillips & Hardy, 2002)? We will consider some examples of each of these accomplishments in this section.

+Social Practices+ All the interactional accomplishments we listed above, social practices, roles, identities, and entities, are bigger than one interaction, although they include interactions. Consider the social practice of debate, which is key to participating in a democratic society. Debate is a form of discourse that is used in classrooms, in courtrooms, and in politics. Debate has social, political, and cultural functions (Van Dijk, 1997b). But few of us would call a debate a conversation, even though debate and conversation are both interactional accomplishments. If you want to study how ideas are debated, you probably will include discursive texts that are not strictly interactive, such as newspaper editorials or letters to the editor. The kind of competitive policy debate that many communication departments sponsor in forensics programs is a particular form of debate as a social practice.

The next step in preparing for participant- observations or interviews will be to think about how you will record and organize your field notes.

+Taking Field Notes+ Since ethnographic research depends on your prolonged immersion in and observations of the field setting and its participants, keeping good notes is a crucial aspect of ethnographic data collection. Start by keeping an informal log of problems or questions you encounter as you plan your study. Then add to that log as you begin to collect and analyze evidence. Your research log will be immensely useful when you are writing up your study. It can be used for recording "experiences, ideas, fears, mistakes, confusions, breakthroughs, and problems that arise during fieldwork. All log entries should be dated so that you can use them to track your emerging interpretations.

+Artifacts+ The objects used by members of a group or culture, such as their clothing, jewelry, buildings, tools, or toys, help ethnographers interpret communication rules, meanings, and behaviors. Think about how your participants dress and present themselves and the items they use in routine activities such as eating, cooking, meeting, or interacting with others. Like archival texts, you will analyze artifacts to support your interpretations or evaluations of evidence gained through participant-observations and interviews. Artifact analysis plays a more central role in rhetorical criticism and critical studies. Because using multiple sources of evidence is customary in ethnography, we will now define three kinds of triangulation and outline their respective benefits for ethnographers.

+Triangulation in Ethnographic Research+ Ethnographers always triangulate two or more data sources. You might start with some document analysis and participant-observations, followed by interviews, and then more observations (a.k.a. iterative cycles of collecting and analyzing evidence). Or you might start observing communication in the field, then conduct some interviews, and later seek out artifacts and archival texts that relate to your initial interpretations or evaluations.

Your discourse project could involve analysis at the micro-, meso-, or macro-level of analysis. Micro-level discourse analysis is the close analysis of language use in a specific local context. Meso-level discourse analysis is a middle level and involves "being relatively sensitive to language use in context, but interested in finding broader patterns, and going beyond the details of the text and generalizing to similar local contexts". Macro-level discourse analysis refers to "an assembly of discourses, ordered and presented as an integrated frame". If you are doing CDA, your analysis will connect macro-level Discourses to micro- and meso-level discourses (a.k.a. discourse tracing.

+Types of Texts (Also Known as Discourse Genres)+ One of the most fundamental ways to analyze language-in-use is to consider how we use language differently when employing different genres, or types of communication. This could mean thinking about how people use language in medical interviews.

Whether you are creating a research report, critical essay, piece of creative writing, or staged performance, one immensely useful strategy is to write your analysis in the form of a case study, or story. Case studies can help align your research with goals that your participants have identified, thus valuing their subjective views about the purpose of doing ethnographic research

+Writing Case Studies+ Interpretive scholars agree that theoretically plausible interpretations can be made from one good case (Mitchell, 1983; Philipsen, 1977, 1982). A typical case is an instance of communicative behavior or practice that "is similar in relevant characteristics to other cases of the same type" (Mitchell, 1983, p. 189). Evidence for comparing cases can come from field observations, interviews, archival documents, artifacts, or some combination of those sources.

+Role and Identity Performances+ What if you wanted to interpret how people use communication to perform certain roles, such as working together on a team project? The group leader might be identified by his or her performance of the leader's role during group meetings as much as by any title or authority designated to him or her before the interactions began. Even if there is a designated leader, some other group member may lead at a particular moment in interaction by producing certain behaviors. Likewise, the formally designated task leader may adopt the interactional role of a group member for certain moments within an egalitarian group. In comparable ways, we all perform our roles such as friend, significant other, or parent through discourse. Furthermore, those roles are represented in all kinds of texts, from movies and books to advertisements, morning news programs, social media posts, etc. You might use DA to interpret and/or evaluate those performances. In fact, performance studies scholars often use DA to develop their embodied representations of communication.

A great deal of research exists in communication, discursive psychology, linguistics, and sociology on the performance of identities, how we display our group memberships through language use (Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Some of the identities you might explore with DA or CDA include cultural membership categories, such as nationality, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, or even gender roles

Keep in mind that securing signatures on informed consent documents may not be enough, by itself, to demonstrate your respect for research participants. Likewise, justice is more than selecting the right participants and distributing outcomes fairly. Justice may be served by studying cultural groups that have been marginalized in previous communication research (Frey, 1998) or by paying attention to the fairness of your procedures during field data collection, analysis, reporting, and performing

Another step you can take to respect participants' choices about participating in research is to become sensitive to how your participants view public and private communication. Then, take the appropriate steps to preserve their privacy. This might mean excluding some interactions from an ethnographic research report or performance, or it could mean using pseudonyms (codenames) that your participants select as a way to demonstrate your respect for them and their perspectives. Finally, you can use member checks to see whether the participants approve of your interpretations and/or writing and performance choices.

If you are planning to "perform or adapt the data for the stage, you may also code with scenes for your performance in your mind" (Madison, 2005, p. 37). Or, you might apply thematic codes, categories suggested by previously published research or theory, as is the case when ethnographers of speaking apply Hymes's (1962) SPEAKING framework. Frameworks are favored by some ethnographers who believe that it is impossible to enter a social scene completely free of any interpretive categories (Philipsen, 1992). As a novice ethnographer, frameworks can help you notice specific things about communication while you are observing and participating with members or while analyzing artifacts and archival documents (Daas & McBride, 2014). Another benefit of using a descriptive framework is the ability to compare interpretations across multiple groups or cultures, whether that work gets done by you in one study or in literature reviews written by other scholars (e.g., see Katriel, 2015, on expanding the agenda for EC research).

Another way that you can begin to analyze a culture or group is to identify and describe the participants' rules for interaction. Rules are prescriptions for who can speak, on what topics, and in what settings and how speaking by others is to be interpreted. One form that a communication rule can take is "Do X in order to be seen as Y." College students know many such rules, such as "Show up for class on time to be seen as a serious, motivated student." Rules are followable, prescribed, and contextual. Therefore, rule-governed behavior is controllable, criticizable, and contextual. All these characteristics suggest strategies that you can use to describe and evaluate the rules of conduct within a culture or group. Remember our discussion of ethnomethods at the start of this chapter? You can look for breaches—instances when members violate rules and are called to account for their behavior—to analyze what rule has been violated in that case (Garfinkel, 1967).

+Ethical Issues in Discourse Analysis Research+ Audiotaping and videotaping people's language-in-use raises a host of ethical issues. The very process of obtaining informed consent to participate in research can influence participants to use language differently than they would when they are not part of a research project. Furthermore, a video camera will not pick up every behavior in any context. You might be able to choose the camera's angle and range. Or, if you are working with a site where talk is recorded all the time (e.g., hospital, airport, some business settings), you may have to adapt your analysis to the camera angle and range selected by others. In addition, it is much harder to ensure participants' privacy with video data: The camera may record cues that are not part of your study, and you cannot preserve anonymity with video data. For these reasons, you must never record people's interactions without their full awareness and consent.

At this point, you should be able to articulate some of the choices that you might make to protect participants' rights as you collect and analyze communicative interactions. It is also important to store data ethically after your study is completed. But there is more to being an ethical discourse analyst than protecting participant rights.

Present your participants with informed consent documents, if required, when they "first arrive for the discussion and before the focus group begins"

Be ready to answer people's questions about the process (e.g., parking, amount of time, bathroom access). You may want to use name tags and/or have participants introduce themselves to each other before you begin recording or ask any questions. Once you begin the interview, keep track of time so that you can keep your promise to participants about how much time they will spend in the interview. Sticking to the amount of time you request from participants is a good way to show them respect. Let the participants direct you regarding the length of time to spend on a single question or topic. Avoid interrupting speakers and look for ways to share floor time if some participants are more dominant or seem reticent to talk. Provide a short oral summary at the end of each interview and "then ask if this summary is complete or if anything has been missed"

Each of these interview types overlaps somewhat with the other types. You may begin your ethnographic interview with only a list of key topics that you want to discuss, or you might have some brief notes about symbols or patterns that you observed in artifacts or other evidence. But ethnographers never use a strict schedule of questions like the ones developed for focus group interviews. Instead, your informants' actions as you converse will suggest what questions are important to pursue next

Before you conduct your first ethnographic interview, you will need to develop face sheets and post-interview comment sheets. Both items will help you maintain your audit trail and track your emerging claims about communication in the field settings that you study. Face sheets include details about the interview, such as a codename for the participant; the date, place, and time of the interview; and any relevant demographic information about the informant. Comment sheets are for you to jot down notes after your interviews, perhaps concerning the emotional tone of the interview, your insights and reflections about any difficulties you encountered during the interview (including audiotaping), and your initial interpretations of or additional questions about the participants' communication.

The groups are often somewhat larger, perhaps 10 to 12 people, in marketing research . Focus group interviews are widely used in media, politics, and sales, where interviews help practitioners interpret and evaluate how some defined group of people feels about a given topic (e.g., how news consumers or voters react to a politician's actions) or a product (e.g., what features millennials most appreciate in their mobile devices). Interviews also are used to study family communication; often, the researcher will interview individual members separately and then interview several family members together

But talking with people about communication also can be accomplished while you are interacting with people in a particular situation or setting. In this case, the source of evidence is called participant-observation, because you are observing the communication that you are helping to create. Researchers use face-to-face interaction to preserve rich cues about communication, such as vocal intonations, rate/pauses, and facial expressions. Participant-observations can focus on the verbal and nonverbal messages themselves, the communicators who construct and interpret those messages, or the channels through which interactions occur.

+Impact+ researchers in EOS and EC studies usually adhere to interpretive paradigm assumptions and values. But autoethnography and performance ethnography scholars tend to embrace the assumptions and values associated with a critical way of knowing about communication. If you are a critical researcher, you will have to ask yourself, "For whom are my interpretations plausible?" and "Who will see my evidence as adequate?" Beyond plausible interpretations and adequate evidence, a piece of performative writing (e.g., dialogue, poetry, song lyrics) will be more coherent and aesthetically pleasing for some audiences than for others (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005).

Carolyn Ellis (2004) is a well-known autoethnographer of communication who has been applauded and chastised for revealing a great deal about herself in her autoethnographic writing and for making friends with the people she studies. Each of her choices, and other scholars' freedom to disagree with those choices, underscores critical scholars' value for voice.

+Researcher Credibility+ Your credibility is an explicit standard for ethnography because you are the instrument through which all subjective interpretations of communication are made. You must consider the credibility of your key informants and the people whose communication you observe as well. Your ethos, and theirs, is what allows you to interpret and represent cultural communication fairly and believably, which is not the same as accuracy or reliability

Chances are you are reading this book as part of your initial research training. So, you may lack experience collecting and analyzing evidence in field settings. But as a communication major, you have theoretic knowledge that sensitizes you to notice things about cultural and group communication.

You can explore an infinite number of social practices with DA, always within specific contexts: You could explore decision-making in business teams (Halvorsen, 2018), flirting in online dating (Mortensen, 2017), or judicial practices in appellate courts (Tracy & Hodge, 2018). Your analysis will tease out how institutional and cultural contexts impact a social practice because the same social practices can be accomplished very differently by members of different cultural groups or in different institutional contexts.

Consider the social practice of politeness behavior. How do you communicate that you are respecting another person or trying not to intrude on his or her autonomy? These are interactional accomplishments of face-giving and face-saving (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1967). In different cultures, people have different rules for what counts as politeness and how to perform it. Those interactional accomplishments also vary in different institutional contexts, even within a single culture

As we said at the outset of this chapter, discourse is the term language scholars use to refer to both talk and text. More specifically, discourse refers to "an interrelated set of texts, and the practices of their production, dissemination, and reception, that brings an object into being.

Consider yourself as a college student: What talk and texts contribute most to the social reality of being a college student in the United States today? Think about written or spoken words, but also everyday and mediated performances, along with visual or pictorial symbols. What topics get talked about, and by whom? How are those texts produced, disseminated, and received? What might it have meant to be a college student in 1958 rather than in 2018? What might it mean to be a college student elsewhere in the United States, or in the world, today? As you consider your own everyday, local language choices, think about how they might connect to larger, more enduring meanings for college student

Corpus DA scholars use computers to collect and display "evidence that was easy to observe before, but too plentiful and diverse to manage". That evidence could include millions of written and spoken words, including unscripted conversations that were broadcast on radio and television or shared on the Internet

Corpus DA is inductive; it starts by closely analyzing a single instance of language use. Then, the researcher analyzes more cases from the same body of texts until she or he can satisfactorily explain how those texts are structured or how they function. Because they use computers and have access to large amounts of textual data, corpus DA scholars sometimes randomly select texts from within corpora, just as social scientists randomly select people to represent a target population. Using computer software allows researchers to generate lists of words that can be found, counted, and classified. Then, they use statistics to compare the frequency with which terms occur within one body of texts or across different corpora. The researchers' interest might be in what terms occur, how often, or what terms are not used:

A genre might even refer to the use of particular words or phrases in a given context. Corpus discourse analysis is a social scientific method used mostly by linguists to explain language structure within particular genres

Corpus discourse analysis is a social scientific method used mostly by linguists to explain language structure within particular genre.

=CHAPTER 14= Interpretive discourse analysis (DA) deals with "what people do with language in specific social settings". Scholars of DA study language use, both talk and texts, in local contexts. Interpretive DA scholars tend to view communicators as having considerable choice at any given moment of interaction and to see meanings as malleable across different contexts.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), however, goes beyond interpreting language use in local contexts to study "the role of text and talk in creating, maintaining, and legitimating inequality, injustice, and oppression in society". Scholars of CDA focus on the role of power in "the shaping of social reality through language" . Thus, CDA researchers explore language use in broad social contexts, such as historical, economic, political, or other institutional influences on language use.

+Entities+ Any entity can be interpreted and evaluated with DA/CDA; but you should choose an entity that is meaningful for participants in a specific context. With this type of claim, you will work to show how "incomplete, ambiguous, and contradictory discourses . . . produce a social reality that we experience as solid and real"

Depending on your epistemological assumptions, you might restrict your DA claim to interpreting a type of talk and text, some interactional accomplishment, or entity. But if you subscribe to more critical assumptions about the purposes of doing research and the role of the knower, then you probably will prefer to evaluate (and contribute to reforming) d/Discourses.

If you devote serious efforts to taking detailed notes, creating analytic memos, and creating a detailed codebook, you will be able to write a more credible research report by describing exactly how you collected evidence and how you analyzed it, along with your key findings. A clear audit trail will allow you to specify how, where, and when you arrived at particular interpretations of the evidence that you analyzed.

Discourse analysis scholarship exists in Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish, among other languages. Usually, language studies deal with one language, in part because linguistic and cultural limitations prevent most scholars from analyzing realities across more than one language or culture . But, there are now more scholars who explicitly aim to "advance the agenda of culturally-inclusive discourse research".Some of those are bilingual scholars use bilingual texts and focus on codeswitching between participants who also are bilingual speakers. Being bilingual adds to your credibility as a language scholar. Doing everything that you can to be a credible DA scholar will help you to create plausible interpretations.

Carbaugh (1988) introduced the idea of performance tests, a form of member checking that requires the researcher to embody culturally competent communication in field settings. While developing interpretations about how employees at a television station viewed themselves and their workplace, Carbaugh (1988) tried out his interpretations by returning to the scene and using categories he had developed (e.g., types of persons, like paper-pusher) while observing and talking with the employees. Then he would take note of their reactions to his use of those terms.

Douglas (1976) used the term fronting to describe participants' attempts to avoid telling the whole truth when being interviewed. Fronting includes telling outright lies, but also telling half-truths, evading questions, and so on. Fronting is a concern when you perform member checks, just as it can be a concern in conducting interviews in the first place (Van Maanen, 1988). But fronting does not directly threaten your ability to develop plausible interpretations. Rather, fronting adds a layer of complexity in understanding your participants' realities. You may detect fronting when performing member checks, or it may be just a suspicion that you log in your field notes and that later develops into part of an interpretation about the communication in that setting.

+Plausible Interpretations+ Plausible interpretations are reasonable, likely truths—they are not warranted as objectively verifiable. You must base the evidence you present in support of an ethnographic claim on an adequate selection of the total corpus of data. Your claim cannot rely just on one interview or a certain observation session. Instead, argue from the examples that you amassed in all your interviews, observations, close readings of artifacts or other texts, and field notes. If at least some of your ethnographic evidence comes from publicly accessible observation records, then other people will be able to check your interpretations of the data against their own. Using quotations from interview transcripts or photographs of artifacts also serves this same purpose.

During your interviews with key informants, use their phrasing and vocabulary whenever possible to increase your chances of tapping into their view of communication. This also decreases your chance of being misinterpreted by participants. Continually question the evidence and your interpretations of it (LeCompte & Goetz, 1982). Consider whether you need to collect more observations using deviant case sampling to find instances of communication that do not fit the interpretations you have tentatively identified (Patton, 1990). To the degree that no such instances of communication can be located, your interpretations are warranted as plausible.

Once you have collected and analyzed adequate evidence for your claim, you will need to complete three tasks before you conclude your field data collection. You will need to check out questionable hunches, evaluate the credibility of your key informants, and settle any "outstanding moral and material debts to informants and others . . . leave on good terms"

Each of these tasks will help you to ensure that you have collected adequate evidence to elicit plausible interpretations of the participants' communication and that you proceed ethically when exiting the field.

Critical scholars are more likely to explicitly articulate their own standpoint with respect to the communication they study and to share their reasons for doing ethnographic research. Crawford's (1996) essay on personal ethnography provides an illustration. He recounted a swimming game among five Peace Corps volunteers in Africa that ended in the death of one volunteer, who was eaten by a crocodile. That experience made Crawford "take the ethnographic turn" as a researcher

Finally, while we cannot give you specific ways to guarantee that your critical ethnography will make people more aware of and empathic toward cultural communication or improve their communication, we believe that we are more likely to achieve those outcomes using credible, plausible research reports, critical essays, and performances. The explosion of performance studies scholarship in our field over the past 2 decades testifies to those scholars' sense that embodied public performances are good ways to impact communication awareness and praxis.

Discourse analysis can be used to interpret and evaluate any of these identity performances in a specific social or historical context. But there is a vast range of role and identity performances that you can explore using DA. Likewise, there is an endless array of texts you might use to interpret and evaluate those performances. Figure 14.4 contains claims from published communication research about role and identity performances.

Finally, your DA project might concern how certain phenomena came to exist at all or how some thing, object, or person is being maintained or changed through interaction.

In fact, you should customize your DA research report and not just rely on conventional procedures because you are helping to constitute the phenomena you study as you write your research report . You will need to be reflexive about "word choice, writing style, and presentation of data, recognizing that these are in part constitutive of the social phenomena under investigation". As a reader of such reports, you might think about how the author's word choice, writing style, or presentation of evidence helps you understand that communicative accomplishment or social practice, too. After all, if your research report is incoherent to readers, your analysis will not be plausible.

Finally, your analysis will be more plausible if you somehow show that your understandings of discourse are consistent with participants' understandings. Try to separate your description of talk and texts from your interpretations. Then, consider using member checks or deviant case sampling to verify interpretations with participants. At least show that you questioned language choices during your analysis by thinking about "how . . . discourse is put together, and what is gained by this construction" . In other words, why was one word or phrase used and not another one? Why was a unit of discourse constructed in a particular way? What is rendered important and visible, or unimportant or invisible, by that sentence (or construction)?

Being able to recognize and perform a range of communicative practices, avoid making mistakes in communication, and recognize violations when they occur, as well as knowing how to be playful with cultural language (e.g., jokes, teasing), demonstrate your degree of membership. However, recognizing these communicative patterns is different from being able to perform culturally competent communication (e.g., interacting competently with members you do not already know or making a joke that others will recognize and appreciate). This is especially relevant for performance ethnography if you intend to recreate and embody verbal and nonverbal elements of communication later, in your creative writing or public performances. If you or your key informants cannot recognize and perform subtle variations in that communication code, then both your credibility and the plausibility of your interpretations will be threatened.

Finally, your faithfulness as you iteratively collect and analyze evidence, and represent it, also contributes to the credibility of your ethnographic project. There are inevitable limits to your credibility: Your memory, hearing, and recognition skills all influence the credibility of the data you collect and the interpretations you report. But your steadfast commitment to represent the participants' (or your own) meanings fully and fairly is key to operating faithfully as an ethnographer. Spend enough time in the field, go over your notes many (not just a few) times, maintain close, trusting relationships with your key informants, and search for additional sources of data to corroborate those you have already considered. Your training and experience, degree of membership, and faithfulness will pave the way for you to offer plausible interpretations of communication.

The inductive analytic process of corpus DA fits with what we have said about interpretive paradigm assumptions. But the explanatory (even predictive) claims, along with the preference for representative sample data and statistical analysis, better fit the paradigmatic assumptions of quantitative social scientists. Moreover, corpus DA scholarship is often critical, in that the researcher's purpose is to reveal instances of exclusion or unequal power relations

For now, you should note that studying one discourse genre can lead you to study one or more social practices, the roles people play in that practice, their identity performances, and the entities that are created through communication. It is never just health-care talk: It is a medical interview, online social support group, pharmaceutical ad, etc. Likewise, it is not just a phone call; it is a call for help, checking in with a friend, getting customer service, soliciting business, and so on. In other words, what we are accomplishing in talking, or writing, is part of the context of that communication. Therefore, an endless variety of social practices, roles, identity performances, and entities can be studied using DA. In the next section, we will show you how to develop each of these sorts of DA claims.

+Coding Units and Developing Thematic Analysis+ Meso-level DA is not only about the language that participants use. It is also about the places where topics get talked about, the roles of who can say what about a topic, the intended audience and distribution of particular messages, etc.

If you are doing DA for the first time, you should create an analytic memo that contains your answers to the questions. It can be overwhelming to analyze multiple samples of talk and text. Taking initial notes about your responses to some of those questions should help you sort out what you think you do and do not yet know about the discourse you are analyzing.

By connecting your everyday language use and its meanings to larger, more enduring Discourses, you will be able to interpret and evaluate how your current meanings came to exist. Institutional talk and texts constrain, but do not wholly determine, our everyday language use. Institutional talk is big D discourse, and it is used by CDA scholars to explore the influence of macro-level context on local social realities

If you are primarily concerned with unequal power relations in the reality of college students at a particular time in history or in a particular geographic or socioeconomic location, you may want to conduct CDA, "a form of intervention in social practice and social relationships"

In addition to creating face sheets and comment sheets, you may want to develop an introduction for your interview: What will you say to a participant before you begin the interview? Hybertson (as cited in Sørnes, Hybertson & Browning, 2015) learned from experience to adapt what he said to the participants and their setting: "Instead of saying, in full-blown academese, 'I have an exploratory research design using participatory observation methods,' I found myself saying, humbly, 'I am here to learn from you and your experience'" (Sørnes, Hybertsen, & Browning, 2015, p. 139).

If your interviews are not done spontaneously, think about how you will negotiate the place and time for the interview. You will want to tape record your interviews so that you can think and talk and not be occupied with field notes during the interview (Lofland & Lofland, 1995). But you should take a few notes while the tape is running just to help you pay attention.

Collaborative ethnography can help you amass adequate evidence and increase the coherence and plausibility of your interpretations. A good audit trail and faithful, detailed field notes will help you to recover these concepts and represent them in your research report, critical essay, or performative writing. Ethnographers always allow room for more than one plausible interpretation of a situation or phenomenon. Paying attention to other possibly valid interpretations is another way to ensure that your interpretations of ethnographic data are plausible. In addition to allowing for multiple plausible interpretations to permeate their research reports (and performative writing), ethnographers use at least two forms of negative case analysis to warrant the plausibility of their interpretations.

Member checks require research participants to review some or all of the materials that you have prepared, such as field notes, interview transcripts, research reports, and performance scripts. The participants can verify (or modify) your interpretations. Member checks can be informal, even spontaneous.

It is sometimes feasible to make notes openly during participant-observations. Perhaps you can incorporate note-taking into the roles you are already playing in the field, disguising it as some other situationally appropriate behavior, such as doing homework in an educational setting or working on a report in an organizational context.

Mobile phones can make note-taking less obtrusive if you can record some notes into your phone while appearing to have a conversation or text with someone else.

Most ethnographers of communication agree that degrees of membership are possible and helpful in gaining access to a setting (e.g., Ellingson, 1998; Lindsley, 1999). After all, you will need certain kinds of access if you are to gain participants' permissions and approvals for doing research there (Spradley, 1980). Your degree of cultural membership impacts your ability to enter the setting, your ability to choose which concepts to attend to, and the interpretations you are able to make about the data (Dollar, 1995; Dollar & Merrigan, 2002; Spradley, 1980).

Not only can you gain access to the setting more easily as a cultural insider, but also membership allows you to recognize features of meaning that would be unrecognized by a nonmember. Your degree of membership and the roles you can enact in a setting also will influence your selection of key informants for ethnographic interviews.

Finally, you may use theoretical sampling, a process of collecting additional data specifically needed to fill out one part of an emerging theory, as grounded theorists do (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). That additional data will give you a way to check the adequacy of your emerging categories and the relationships you are theorizing among those categories. In addition, you may use deviant case sampling, the deliberate search for cases that differ from the ones that you have already collected, to sort out contradictions or inconsistencies in your initial interpretations

Once you have some sense of your key informants, you can think about how many interview opportunities you will need and what will be the duration of those contacts (e.g., how long you will observe in the setting and how many interviews, of what length, you will need to complete with members).

Focus group interviews allow people the comfort of talking with similar others and the chance to respond to other people's experiences. That synergy might be useful for several reasons, including the comfort of being interviewed in a group, rather than individually.

Once you know whether you intend to employ individual interviews, focus groups, or both (and in what order), you are ready to think specifically about locating participants for your study.

Critical ethnographers go beyond interpreting and evaluating cultural variation when they "attempt to take action against the social inequalities exposed in their research, action aimed at challenging the status quo and calling for a rebalancing of power"

Perhaps the earliest and most well-known proponent of critical ethnography in communication is Dwight Conquergood (1983, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995). Conquergood's participatory research with a Chicago Latino gang included actions aimed at helping gang members stay out of jail, learn to read and write, and gain a more empathic voice in the media

+Researcher Training and Experience+ Whether you are performing close readings of textual evidence, observing communication in real time, or interviewing people, you will need both methodological awareness (Seale, 1999) and theoretical sensitivity (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Both terms suggest highly developed knowledge of, and experience with, communication research methods and theories.

Reading this book is helping you to build methodological awareness, understanding different ways to study communication and their relative value. Theoretical sensitivity is a similar concept, except that it connotes experience with and knowledge of communication theories rather than research methods. Although interpretive researchers often enter the field of data collection without explicit research questions or purposes, they are not blank slates onto which the lived experience of participants can be written. Strauss and Corbin (1998) emphasized the unquestionable fact (and advantage), that trained researchers are theoretically sensitized. Researchers carry into their research the sensitizing possibilities of their training, reading, and research experience, as well as explicit theories that might be useful if played against systematically gathered data. (p. 167)

When using reformist claims, scholars go a step beyond evaluation and attempt to change social structures, meanings, and ways of communicating. Put simply, structural criticism works to evaluate and change material and social structures, such as the pay gap between men and women, disparate imprisonment rates between White people and people of color in the United States, or sources of food available in richer and poorer neighborhoods Poststructural criticism works to change people's language use as a way to instigate changes in social and material structures For poststructural critics, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Gilles Deleuze, such reform can include revealing meanings and structures that exist below people's everyday awareness, especially as they relate to power and oppression. Those meanings and structures are created through communication; once we are aware of them, we may choose to take steps to change them.

Reformist claims function to identify the negative consequences of an existing social system as a way of instigating social change. For example, if you are concerned that film representations of violence are adversely affecting society, you might use your research to show who is being affected and how, always within a specific context.

In addition to training and experience with theory and methods, your membership in the group or culture you study may add to your credibility. But not everyone agrees that membership status necessarily confers additional credibility for interpretive research. Sometimes a greater degree of membership can blind the researcher to "the peculiarities he is supposed to observe"

Regardless of your own degree of membership, you will need to evaluate the credibility of your key informants. The people with whom you interact as well as those you observe and interview must be good representatives of their group or culture. They must represent different types of participants in that setting (i.e., different roles) if you are to capture the full range of subjective meanings available to members. When you select whom to observe, or interview, consider what those participants know, can do, and can explain about their own cultural communication.

If you are conducting autoethnography or performance ethnography, you will need to engage in two additional steps as you analyze your evidence. First, you will need to "reflect on power relations and ideologies present throughout all the discourse". To support claims of evaluation and reform, you must consider whose voices are present and whose are absent. Which interpretations are most plausible to you, and why? How might another interpretation be more plausible to someone with a different standpoint?

Second, you will have to struggle with representing your evidence when doing autoethnography or performance ethnography. Manuscripts for EOS and EC studies typically fit the conventions of research reports: They use American Psychological Association format, contain (sometimes brief) literature reviews, and are organized predictably by sections such as methods, participants, findings, and so on. By contrast, autoethnographic and performative writing vary immensely in style, tone, and structure .You will need to decide how closely your manuscript or performance will mirror (or violate) certain conventions of scholarship . How will you meet your editor's (or audience's) expectations without erasing the voices and experiences of your participants or making them seem illiterate, uninformed, or otherwise incompetent?

+Humanistic Values+ Values guide all our choices as scholars, starting with the way we frame research problems and decide what will count as evidence. Our values also influence how we think about selecting good evidence for particular claims. Three humanistic values are prioritized by interpretive and critical communication scholars: subjectivity, rich description, and voice. In this section, we will define each value and suggest how it is enacted in communication research and creative work.

Subjectivity refers to our human ability to know using our minds; it is based on our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Embracing subjectivity means that perceptions of reality are every bit as important as (and sometimes even more important than) any reality that exists independent of human perception. Note that valuing subjectivity clearly separates interpretive and critical researchers from quantitative social scientists, who prioritize objectivity (i.e., the ability to know about something outside our own perceptions or experiences).

Next, think about how your interactions in the field, or your departure from those relationships once you finish data collection, affect your participants. If you create performances based on your observations and interviews, how will you take responsibility for your interpretations as you decide what to perform, from whose point of view, and what to reveal, conceal, or overlook? Will you fictionalize any part of the performance? If so, will that be known to your audience? What impact will your manuscript or your performances have on your participants' safety, dignity, or privacy?

The first way that you can avoid these ethical pitfalls is by preserving other people's freedom to consent to participate in research. In general, you must obtain IRB approval before you interview participants, but you may want to do some initial observations in a setting before you know who to interview, let alone what questions to ask. If you are observing legally competent adults in a public setting, you can conduct your initial observations before pursuing IRB approval of your project. In less-public settings, it is a good idea to at least request and gain consent from people before you start observing them for research purposes.

You can avoid trivializing your participants' communication by being immersed in the field over a long time, taking faithful notes during observations and interviews, and honing your research skills (e.g., listening, fading into the background, asking questions without arousing defensiveness, conducting member or performance checks.

The main thing you can do to avoid sensationalizing others' communication is to become more self-reflexive: Notice when you are feeling tempted to overstate or exaggerate something because you want your readers or audience members to focus on that aspect of the participants' world

Consistent with a humanistic approach, DA researchers use inductive reasoning. You will start with something specific, a particular type of talk or texts, or some theoretic concept that you can apply to talk or texts. Your study will be more credible if you start with something you already know about from your own experience or something about which you care deeply.

The texts produced by powerful actors and transmitted through multiple channels to many recipients are likely to change social realities more than the texts produced and transmitted by weak actors through ineffective channels to few recipients. Not all texts or talk are available for analysis. There are ethical and practical reasons not to analyze some texts or talk.

Discourse analysts use several different kinds of codes: open coding and categorizing, in vivo coding, and thematic coding. Researchers use thematic coding to organize open codes into larger patterns, or themes, that show how open codes are related to one another. In grounded theory, this is called axial coding

Thematic coding is a more complex and more rigorous analytic process than just grouping open codes into categories. Performing high-quality thematic analysis requires some training and experience. To understand the process, we will review open coding and in vivo coding here. Open coding starts as you write descriptions of talk and text units directly onto interview transcripts, policy documents, or field notes. Here, you will use what you already know from experience with your own cultural and social groups to interpret what talk and texts mean or how they function. Likewise, highlight in vivo codes directly on your transcripts or other textual evidence as you notice instances of the participants' own language for things, relationships, places, and so on.

+Transcribing Interviews+ Most ethnographers transcribe their interviews, translating audio- or videotaped recordings of conversations with key informants into digital form. Usually, verbatim transcription of the participants' words is enough, perhaps with cues of laughter or other important nonverbal behaviors. Ethnography typically does not require the level of detailed transcription used by conversation analysts (e.g., cues about intonation, interruptions, or overlapping talk).

Transcribe your first interview as soon as possible after you conduct it using the format and notation conventions that we shared in Chapter 10, "Conversation Analysis." Transcribe each interview as you go so that you will know when you need to collect more data, where to classify and file observations or field notes, and so on. Doing your own transcription is a chore, but it is of enormous value to interpretive researchers because it keeps you close to your evidence. You will be forming your interpretations as you listen to or watch the tapes many times.

The fundamental purpose of triangulation in interpretive and critical research is to enrich the description of emic realities (i.e., participants' meanings). That is why triangulating multiple sources of evidence is customary in all four kinds of ethnographic research. In addition, ethnographers sometimes compare multiple sources of a single type, such as analyzing written diaries alongside self-report interviews or comparing videotaped interactions with their own field observations. All these kinds of comparisons can reveal deeper aspects of participants' subjective meanings and even contested meanings among members of a group or culture

Triangulating data sources, settings, or investigators is bound to produce some conflicting interpretations. Those conflicts will help you to see who does and does not share particular interpretations or evaluations of communication in the setting you study. Likewise, collaborating with other researchers can strengthen and complicate your interpretations. For example, news organizations often deploy more than one reporter in the same setting.

+Plausible Interpretations+ DA scholars do not claim to offer the one best possible explanation of communicative behavior, the way conversation analysts do. Instead, DA scholars claim to interpret multiple, plausible interpretations of how a discourse functions or what it means. Your DA interpretations will be most plausible if you analyze enough relevant evidence (adequacy), make your interpretations clear and logical to others (coherence), and use negative case analysis (i.e., base your argument on both examples and counterexamples).

Triangulating multiple sources of talk and text across settings and situations is one way to ensure that you analyze an adequate amount of relevant evidence, especially if your analysis connects micro-, meso- and macro-level discourses. But the best way to ensure adequacy, or completeness , is to look for theoretical saturation, the sense that you understand everything important about the discourse(s) and that analyzing more evidence would reveal nothing new. This does not mean that you will resolve different, competing categories of meaning—in fact, you will allow "different voices to pervade" your DA research report.

As you start to notice patterns and create categories of open and in vivo codes, you should start a codebook, a list of all your open-coding categories and their definitions. You may want to include two to three examples of each open code in your codebook and note where in your data you located those examples (i.e., audit trail).

Working through open coding and creating a codebook will require multiple close readings of your DA evidence. As you argue from examples of discourse, you will identify patterns of similar meanings or function across units of text, participants, or settings. Being immersed in your evidence helps you to notice these patterns, which is the beginning of thematic analysis. But thematic analysis goes beyond seeing a pattern to identifying how the patterns works in a context.

You also may want to incorporate visual media, such as film, video, signs, posters, or still photography, in your ethnographic project (e.g., Vignes, 2008). Besides paying attention to visual media that you encounter in field settings, you may want to take photographs of people in large groups or capture images of key artifacts to capture some of what your eyes can see as empirical data.

You could ask participants to take their own photos or video of what is important to them and triangulate those sources of evidence with your interviews or participant-observations. Or, you also could use archival photographs to elicit particular topics during ethnographic interviews. In all these cases, the visual media then become texts for analysis and can be compared with evidence gained from self-report interviews and/or participant-observations. The objects used by communicators in field settings are another important source of textual evidence for ethnography. Artifacts

Are you privileging your participants' meanings or has your own subjectivity become more important? Finally, you can avoid the curator's exhibitionism and the skeptic's cop-out by being honest with yourself, your readers, or your audience members about why you chose to study a particular topic and how you arrived at particular interpretations of communication in that setting or situation

You may be tempted to cop out if you find, during data collection and analysis, that you do not like your participants very much or disapprove of their communication

+Selecting Key Informants+ Ethnographic observations rely on and are influenced by identification of key informants, group members who are highly articulate and/or especially helpful and wise relative to other participants in that setting. One good way to identify key informants in your setting is to look for gatekeepers, the participants who have power to grant or deny your access to the setting. In addition, you might want to identify sponsors. A sponsor is "someone who goes around and personally introduces you to the membership, vouches for your study, and helps you secure the access and resources you need"

You probably will want to purposively select informants who can represent different qualities present in the setting or situation that you study; this process is called maximum variation sampling. Convenience and volunteer sampling are not as effective as maximum variation or snowball methods for ethnography, because convenience and volunteer samples may not maximize the range of plausible interpretations or improve the coherence of interpretations in a field setting.

If you are using mediated communication evidence in your ethnographic study, the processes of gaining participants' informed consent, disclosing research procedures, making agreements, negotiating access, and so on all are impacted by differences between virtual and embodied communities

You will need to approach your storage and later use of mediated evidence with particular caution so that you maintain participant privacy and ensure freedom from harm for as long as the evidence is kept in an archive

Your analysis will be iterative. Your goal is to create interpretations that are based on the participants' meanings. So, you must avoid creating interpretations that are based solely on what you knew about this cultural communication before you began collecting evidence.

Your interpretations must come from reading and rereading your field notes, interview transcripts, artifacts, and other textual evidence multiple times. In the process of closely reading your evidence, you will code and begin to categorize the participants' communication.

Because humanists believe that there are many potentially legitimate interpretations of any social situation, your task will be to develop plausible, rather than necessarily correct or accurate, interpretations and evaluations. In this section, we present three aspects of developing plausible interpretations: adequate evidence, coherence, and negative case analysis.

+Adequate Evidence+ Adequate evidence means that you have enough of the right kind of data or evidence to offer plausible interpretations and evaluations. In interpretive and critical scholarship, the tasks of data collection and analysis are often overlapping: You begin analyzing your interpretations and evaluations with the first observations, interviews, or pass through a text. You continue modifying your analysis as you examine more evidence. Overlapping collection and analysis of evidence helps you make good decisions about when you have enough relevant evidence. You stop collecting and analyzing evidence when the interpretations and evaluations you have accrued are adequate to support your claim(s).

Triangulation also can produce "divergent results and provide a provocative analysis". Hence, triangulation is fairly common in interpretive research and communication criticism because it contributes to surfacing multiple realities and enriches our subjective understandings of communication. As you consider different sources of evidence, or different communication settings, inconsistencies and "contradictory findings may actually help to understand the richness of what is being studied.

+Basic Analytic Strategies for Interpretive and Critical Research+ No matter which sources of evidence you employ in your interpretive or critical research or how you select that evidence, your analysis will always begin with multiple close readings of the evidence. As you read your texts many times, you will start to notice some patterns emerging from your interviews, observations, or the artifacts you examine. Analyzing themes or patterns in context and constantly comparing them across different actors or situations helps you to build a grounded theory, a theory that begins with observations of communication in the field. Rather than imagining how a communicative process might work in practice, grounded theory "evolves during actual research, and it does this through continuous interplay between analysis and data collection"

Typically, a verbatim record of the words spoken is enough, so you might not transcribe paraverbal cues like pause length, intonation, or interruption behaviors. Sometimes, depending on your purpose, you will only transcribe certain segments of talk, rather than the entire interview. Get advice from a more experienced researcher and read studies that are similar to yours to determine what level of transcription will be appropriate for your study.

+Coding and Categorizing Interview Evidence+ Just as you had to plan interviews and focus group data collection based on your research purpose and your resources, you must also plan how you will analyze interview evidence.

According to Krueger and Casey (2015), "The accepted rule of thumb is to plan three or four focus groups with each type or category of participant" (p. 23). You will likely reach saturation after conducting three or four focus groups with a single type of participant. So, think about whether you want to interview different types of people, and get advice from your research methods instructor or a more experienced researcher about how many individual or focus group interviews you should conduct for your study.

+Creating the Interview Protocol(s)+ You will need to decide what amount of structure (i.e., unstructured, semistructured, or structured) makes the most sense for your purposes. Do you want to use the funnel or inverted funnel order to formally structure your interviews? Will a set of questions with potential probes be enough? Or would a short list of topics, in no particular order, better suit your purposes? In some cases, it may be helpful to use stimulus materials, artifacts, examples, or texts that allow participants and researcher to coorientate to something specific during an interview.

Discourse analysts and ethnographers pay attention to participants' social category memberships and how setting or situation constrains people's options for what can be done with language. Thinking about institutional frames for talk, people's group memberships, settings, and situations are all ways of broadening your view of communication context, beyond the talk or other observable communication behaviors that provide evidence for your research.

+Critical Research Claims+ Researchers use standpoint theory to posit "that the material, social, and symbolic circumstances of a social group shape what members of that group experience, as well as how they think, act, and feel" Your standpoint will affect what topics you believe are worthy of study, your views of the topic you elect to pursue (or ignore), and the kinds of evaluations you offer or reforms you want to see achieved.

If your scholarship is explicitly critical, then you will want to establish your researcher positionality, your identities and the stance you take toward your topic of study (Madison, 2005). Van Dijk (1997b) notes, "The critical scholars make their social and political position explicit; they take sides, and actively participate, in order to uncover, demystify, or otherwise challenge dominance" (p. 22). In other words, positionality is an extension of researcher credibility because your identity and your stance toward a topic are part of what makes you knowledgeable and trustworthy. For critical scholars, "reducing unsustainable attitudes and practices takes precedence over detachment or balance" (Cox, 2007, as cited in Pezzullo & de Onís, 2018, p. 115, on environmental justice). This is a good point at which to consider your degree of membership in the social group or setting you study.

+Degree of Membership+ Your degree of membership, or the extent to which you belong to a group or social setting, is especially important when you are doing field research (i.e., participant-observations, interviews, artifact analysis). Even well-trained, highly experienced researchers are not automatically credible interpreters of cultural communication. One way that you can gain credibility is to study social groups to which you already belong. Your membership in the group can provide several advantages. First, members can sometimes gain access to the sites of study more easily than can nonmembers (Ellingson, 1998; Lindlof, 1995). Second, members can recognize and enact a range of communicative features, patterns, and practices (and recognize blunders in the enactment of these practices) in ways that nonmembers cannot (Dollar, 1995). Third, members ask different questions about a situation than do nonmembers, but even more important, members understand how social relationships and actions are constructed differently than do nonmembers.

Like some autoethnographers, performance ethnographers produce critical essays that differ in tone and organization from the research reports used in interpretive communication research.

+Ethnographic Claims+ As a novice ethnographer, you should first select a research topic that you sincerely care about. After all, you will be immersed in collecting and analyzing evidence over an extended period and possibly creating performances with the data. The amount of time could be weeks or months for microethnography and it might be years for a macroethnographic project. You simply cannot do justice to a macroethnographic project in one school term.

Negative case analysis helps you know when you need to collect additional data to back up or test some aspect of your early interpretations. For discourse analysts, searching for counterexamples is a central aspect of data analysis (Jacobs, 1990; Pomerantz, 1990). Rhetorical critics attempt to locate texts that demonstrate a different, although equally plausible interpretation (i.e., the negative case). As a critic, you may be able to show how different interpretations of the same text are warranted as plausible. If there are no negative cases that seem to threaten your interpretations or evaluations, then you are ready to consider how your analysis might impact communication theory or praxis.

+Impact as a Standard+ When you come from the critical-paradigm perspective, you must decide not only whether your argument is plausible, but also whether it makes a positive contribution to society (Afifi, 2017). As B. L. Brock, Scott, and Chesebro (1990) pointed out, an appeal for reforming communication is often made on moral or ethical grounds. If your work is to have impact, you will need to show how your analysis increases your audience members' awareness of oppressive realities and/or how they might think and act differently as a result of your study.

Although communication critics rarely use the term research design, they do rely on the hermeneutic circle, or close reading of texts. Suppose you begin with a specific focus of analysis, to which you apply some theoretic concept (e.g., use of pathos in Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech). You will work back and forth many times between the text you are evaluating and your own subjective interpretations until you are satisfied that your evaluation is supported by the evidence.

+Interpretive Research Claims+ Both interpretive and critical researchers assume that people have different subjective realities that are socially constructed through communication. Furthermore, our realities are contextual and based on each person's standpoint. So, what you think of as useful/useless, beautiful/ugly, or effective/ineffective communication will depend on your group memberships and on the contexts in which you are communicating. Thus, for interpretive researchers, the purpose of research is to understand how and why meanings are created as they are, mainly from the point of view of participants in that context

One reason that interview studies are so prevalent is that they can be used to address practical problems in a specific context.

+Interview Evidence+ Interviewing people, whether individually or in groups, is likely to require IRB review. Check with your instructor or your university's IRB website to see whether you will need to clear your study with the IRB before you begin recruiting participants and conducting interviews.

Participant-observation will help you see what members do and say in field settings. It will also help you identify key informants, members who are especially well informed and articulate about cultural communication in that setting. Those interviews are the next important source of ethnographic evidence.

+Interviews with Key Informants+ An ethnographic interview is "the most spontaneous, least structured form of interviewing". Ethnographic interviews are conversations between a researcher and some well-informed, articulate members of the culture or group being studied. If the researcher is one of the key informants, then the work is at least partially auto- ethnographic.

To make a coherent argument, you must identify a good claim, select the right kind of evidence, and give logical, well-chosen reasons for the links you are making between your evidence and claim(s). If you have adequate evidence and have developed a coherent analysis, then you may want to consider one additional step to ensure that your interpretations and evaluations are plausible. Consider negative case analysis.

+Negative Case Analysis+ Negative case analysis involves a conscientious search for counterexamples, instances of evidence that do not fit your interpretations or evaluations of communication (S. Jackson, 1986). If you find some instances of communication that do not fit your initial interpretations, you must revise your interpretations to accommodate that evidence or develop a new interpretation that accounts for the negative case. You must keep adapting and revising interpretations until there are no negative cases left (Lindlof & Taylor, 2018).

A faithful researcher will continue to do the right things, even when they are difficult. Doing your own fieldwork, transcription, filing, coding, and writing are some specific, practical ways that you can practice faithfulness (D. L. Miller, Creswell, & Olander, 1998). If your methods include close readings of texts and artifacts, you can begin doing things right by identifying your own assumptions about your topic, the setting, or the participants at the outset of your project. Honestly acknowledging your own limitations as a research instrument also shows your faithfulness. Reading through the text hundreds of times and making detailed notes about how you understand the text and why is a way of being faithful to the evidence.

+Plausible Interpretations as a Standard+ A basic purpose of humanistic research is to understand how meanings are created, maintained, or changed by people communicating in a certain context. So, the warrants for interpretive and critical scholarship begin with researcher credibility and proceed next to plausibility: Is there enough relevant evidence, presented coherently, that your audience can recognize and appreciate the meanings you studied?

Finally, collaborating with other researchers can help you recognize and temper your own subjective interpretations. This is related to your degree of membership in the cultural or social situation you are studying. After all, sharing group memberships with your interview participants can help you understand their perspectives and meanings. But for interpretive research, the trick is bracketing, or separating your own meanings and interpretations from whatever participants share during their interviews. Here, a greater degree of membership can actually blind a researcher to "the peculiarities he is supposed to observe" In that case, using multiple interview facilitators, note-takers, or analysts whose degree of membership in the situation being studied varies should enrich your data collection and analysis.

+Plausible Interpretations+ The first test of plausibility is adequacy of evidence. Have you conducted enough interviews, with the right kind of participants, to fairly describe and interpret their meanings? When you are operating inductively, looking for saturation is the best way to know whether you have amassed adequate evidence. Adequacy is about how well you understand variations in participant meanings and your ability to account for those differences. It is not about the sheer quantity of evidence, as measured by number of participants or the page length of your transcripts.

+Warranting Interpretive and Critical Paradigm Research+ and impact, the degree to which research and creative work changes communicators' awareness or praxis. Impactful research and creative work help people understand communication better and may change the ways they think about topics or how they communicate. Making a social impact is an explicit standard for critical communication scholars.

+Researcher Credibility as a Standard+ Researcher credibility means many things, and it is important in all research and creative work. But whenever you collect and analyze evidence using your senses, your thoughts, and your own experiences, then you are the measuring instrument for the study. Your interpretations and evaluations cannot be warranted by the predictive validity of a questionnaire (as in survey research) or by two coders' agreement about message categories (as in content analysis). Instead, when you interpret and critique communication, your skills at reading closely, observing communication in real time, interviewing people, taking notes, and tracking where you came up with interpretations or evaluations become the standards by which any link between your claim and the evidence can be judged.

An interview protocol, a document that contains interview topics or questions and probes, in the order most appropriate for your purposes.

+Should I Use Individual or Focus Group Interviews?+ Depending on your research question or purpose, you might employ individual or focus group interviews or some combination of the two types. You will have to consider whether you intend to conduct face-to-face interviews in person with your participants or use some form of mediated communication (e.g., Skype, Zoom, email). Review Table 7.7, which shows the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys, as you think about this choice. You will need to consider what your participants would prefer, as well as what resources you can devote to your study:

The fact that dominant power holders can entrench themselves further as awareness of their power grows, along with increased attention in the field to communicating for social impact, led us to emphasize changes in awareness and praxis as a standard for evaluating critical scholarship. We end this chapter by comparing interpretive and critical paradigm scholars' views of truth with the view of truth held by quantitative social scientists.

+Two Views of Truth+ Valuing objectivity and generalizability, using deductive reasoning, and demonstrating accurate, consistent measurement of variables will lead you to a different sense of what is true about communication. Each paradigm has different warrants, in part, because the very nature of truth itself is viewed differently in each paradigm.

Ethnographers explicitly prefer to study communication in field settings because ethnographers aim to richly describe communication the way participants accomplish it together based on their cultural norms and understandings. Being immersed in a field setting over a long time and triangulating evidence from interviews, participant-observation, and artifact analysis are the hallmarks of ethnographic research.

+Using Triangulation to Enhance Rich Descriptions+. Because humanist researchers believe that there is more than one plausible interpretation of reality at play in any social situation, triangulation of different sources of evidence, research settings, or even researcher viewpoints helps these researchers to see "various pictures of the same phenomenon and provide a broader view"

With systematic coding and categorizing of evidence to the point of saturation, you will be able to show how your study serves to uphold the values of subjectivity, rich description, and voice. You also will be able to meet the interpretive paradigm standards of researcher credibility and plausible interpretations.

+Warranting Interview Studies+ The degree of care you exercise in choosing individual or focus group interviews (or both), recruiting and selecting participants, creating questions, conducting and transcribing interviews, and crafting your research report contributes to the quality of your interview research. If you are faithful at each stage of your project, you will greatly increase your chance of producing high-quality, believable interpretations.

Both social science and humanistic research are important for academics and industry (Cohen, 2001; Jackson et al., 2007). After all, public relations practitioners must anticipate how different audiences will interpret an organization's response to a crisis. Journalists must convey the realities of the individuals they interview to people who consume the news. Salespeople must interpret what product features matter most to different customers. Lawyers must anticipate which interpretations and evaluations will sit well, or poorly, with judges and jury members. Politicians make similar calculations about voters. So, if you have the skills to collect and make sense of focus group data, or comments left on social media, and if you can detect trends in what is said at a town hall meeting and reflect on how to respond to those comments, you will be a more effective employee, manager, and community member

All our choices as communication scholars are rooted in values and assumptions about what counts as knowing, how to know something, and the purpose of researchIf, in your research or creative work, you make an argument about multiple, plausible meanings in communication, then you are likely to prefer inductive reasoning as a way to make claims of interpretation and evaluation. Hence, we start this chapter by considering the humanistic values that guide interpretive and critical research and creative work.

If you claim to evaluate or reform communication in some way, you might proceed from close readings of texts and artifacts to theorizing some aspect of communication, as happens in rhetorical criticism. Or you might use some existing theoretic concepts to evaluate the evidence and then suggest reforms, as critical scholars do.

Along with careful, close reading of texts and artifacts, all interpretive and critical research depends on diligent note-taking. You will need to take detailed notes from the time you begin thinking about your project until the day you complete your research report or critical essay. To interpret and critique communication effectively, you must be able to show when and how you arrived at your interpretations, evaluations, and ideas about how communication should be changed. You will use an audit trail to document that development and progress in your research.

As you read critical ethnographic studies and conduct those studies yourself, you will notice a blurred line between making claims with ethnography and writing about or performing a culture. Goodall (2000) argued that critical ethnographers approach writing as inquiry. In critiquing power relations within a culture or between cultural groups, writing is not something you do after data analysis is completed. Instead, writing is the manner of interrogating and exposing power relations within a social situation. It starts with you interrogating your own beliefs and participation in an oppressive social system, especially if you use autoethnographic writing or if you participate in collaborative writing.

As we mentioned before, performance ethnographers use their field observations of communication, along with interviews, artifacts, and textual analyses, to create public performances or creative writing that evaluates cultural communication norms and practices. Those performances may infer or explicitly show how communication practices and meanings should be changed.

Using elements from the SPEAKING framework allows EOS and EC researchers to address several broad questions about speech communities and their communication codes. This might include describing a community's speech events and activities, showing how members use communication resources to organize their own and interpret others' actions, or demonstrating how those resources vary within a culture.

Beyond describing a speech community's communication events and activities, their communication code, and how communication resources vary within a cultural group, you can use ethnographic research to support interpretive claims about more general relationships between culture and communication. At its broadest level, an interpretive ethnographic claim serves to address how culture socially constructs members' communication and vice versa.

+A Note About Research Settings+ Humanist researchers often select textual evidence from an archive, a preexisting collection of artifacts or messages. Examples of archives include the county clerk's office where birth, marriage, divorce certificates, property sales, and other evidence is recorded; museum collections; repositories of legal and policy documents, etc. Any digital repository is an archive (e.g., public records of climate change, homicide rates, or rape-kit processing, along with individuals' and organizations' social media accounts, emails, blogs, or websites). Of course, all self-reported data and observations of communication can be archived once collected (e.g., conversation databases maintained by language and social interaction scholars are). Whenever you select evidence from an archive, the idea of research setting becomes irrelevant.

But a great deal of interpretive and some critical communication scholarship begins in a field setting, where communication occurs in its usual and customary fashion. If you study communication in a field setting (e.g., social movements), then you will likely use participant-observations and/or interviews as sources of evidence. Communication critics who employ rhetorical field methods combine archival texts with evidence from field settings "to critique embodied, often mundane, forms of rhetoric"

+Researcher Credibility+ Whether you are doing academic or industry-related interview research, the best advice is to be honest with yourself first about your training and experience, theoretical sensitivity, and methodological awareness for conducting and analyzing interviews. Notes from your audit trail should help you recognize instances where you were baffled by what participants' responses might mean or where you struggled to suspend your own judgments about something the participants said during an interview. You may need to acknowledge that your interview protocol led participants to highlight certain meanings. You may even have advice to share with future researchers about how to better approach questions, recruitment, or other aspects of an interview study.

Collaborating with one or more other researchers to conduct interviews and analyze them can be a terrific way to increase your credibility, especially if you lack experience or training. Your fellow researchers may bring theoretical sensitivity or methodological expertise that you lack, not to mention expertise in writing questions, running recording equipment, transcribing interviews, or keeping track of all the evidence. Discussing your interview questions, initial codes, and categories with a more experienced researcher is great advice for any beginning researcher. However, collaborating with other researchers also requires coordinating activities and interpretations:

However, raising awareness of hegemonic realities sometimes has the opposite effect: Awareness can make people in the dominant group dig in to preserve their power. For example, awareness of gender and racial oppression has led to terms like political correctness becoming part of ordinary language use in the United States. Speakers who are accused of being "PC" are charged with acting more respectful of someone else's social category memberships than they feel inside. They may act respectful as a strategy for preserving their own power.

Communicating for impact refers to efforts to "meet society's most significant challenges" (Buzzanell, 2009, p. vii). Those challenges include designing and delivering equitable health care, creating "technologies and virtual communication processes that enhance collaboration among nations" (p. viii), improving learning in science, technology, engineering, and math education, and understanding human impacts on climate change, among others.

Reflexivity is the process by which researchers recognize that they are inseparable from the settings, contexts, and cultures they are attempting to evaluate and/or change. Critical scholars use reflexivity to question their own interpretations and representations of social situations

Critical and interpretive scholars also share a view of meaning as contextual, but communication critics tend to take a broader view of context than do interpretive researchers. Instead of broadening context to include institutions, social groups, or settings, communication critics think about macro-level contexts, such as history, politics, or economics, along with culture, to frame their assertions about inequity in the allocation or use of power resources and the ways in which society needs to change. This is often accomplished by examining the historical, political, or social practices of both mainstream and marginalized groups.

+Preference for Nonrandom Selection Methods+ Nonrandom selection of evidence is preferable whenever your research purpose is to understand how meaning is created among particular people or in particular message contexts. Whereas quantitative social scientists prefer large, randomly selected data samples, interpretive and critical researchers prefer smaller samples of non randomly selected evidence because those samples preserve communicators' subjective realities and allow you to richly describe communication in a specific context.

Deciding which elements of a communication text to describe or who to observe to understand communication is often considered an interpretive decision . So, what rationale might you have for using each of these nonrandom selection methods?

+Evaluative and Reformist Claims+ Ethnographers' evaluative claims judge the worth or merit of cultural communication activities, practices, or messages. Evaluative claims are quickly put to use in support of changing communication practices in particular groups or cultural contexts. Perhaps you, the researcher, will decide what changes are needed, or you may give the results of your analysis to another person or group who will then decide what changes to attempt

During the 1990s, results of critical ethnographies (i.e., EC, autoethnography, or performance ethnography) began indicating how norms for communication and power use privileged some group members and oppressed others

When you are analyzing language-in-use, cultural practices, or a communication artifact, purposive sampling helps you access just the right people or texts for your study.

Ethnographers interview key informants, members who are especially knowledgeable and articulate about communicating in a given culture or who occupy certain positions in their groups. Communication critics select artifacts precisely because they think analyzing that artifact will contribute to theorizing about some sort of persuasive process.

What situation, ritual, or setting in your life most stands out as you consider moments of communicative effectiveness or ineffectiveness ? When you think about the cultural knowledge you use to make sense of your day-to-day experiences and to coordinate actions, what social activities and events come to mind? Which of your situations or activities would mean something different to people who do not share your personal and cultural history? Choosing a topic that you already know and care about will help you to enter the inductive reasoning process more competently because you already have subjective knowledge that will make you more credible in that topic area.

Ethnography and grounded theory both include a preference for starting with field data. As Hymes (1962) noted, "The analysis must be made on the ground. We must know what patterns are available in what contexts, and how, where, and when they come into play" (p. 20). Using an inductive approach means that you will not know your exact research question at the start of your ethnographic project. Instead, you will begin with only the setting or social situation that you want to explore. You will collect some initial field data because you must know something about the nature and quality of the relationships in a social context to know which questions you can effectively pursue there.

=CHAPTER 13= learn to conduct ethnographic communication research. Ethnographers study communication over long periods of time, collecting and analyzing evidence iteratively. So, this chapter also will build your skills at documenting and organizing field notes, as well as coding and categorizing communication evidence. Maintaining your audit trail will allow you to develop more plausible claims of interpretation, evaluation, and reform.

Ethnography does not have one universal definition. In general, it is a method for grasping "the native's point of view". Ethnographic communication research arose over the past 45 years, although ethnography originated well before that in cultural anthropology and ethnomethodology.

Ethnography-of-speaking studies in communication have been most closely associated with Philipsen. and his colleagues from the University of Washington. However, Zand-Vakili, Kashani, and Tabandeh's (2012) EOS of the television series Friends suggests that the SPEAKING framework can be used to improve intercultural teaching by helping teachers and students focus on the specific norms, genres, and speech events of another cultural group

Ethnography of communication (EC) focuses on how members of particular speech communities constitute their place and positions in particular settings or situations. Ethnography-of-communication researchers assume that "the effective communicative resources for creating shared meaning and coordinating action vary across social groups". They also assume that there is more than one effective way to communicate in any social group because there are multiple plausible realities. Instead of one shared reality, "there are moments of communicative effectiveness" in which participants "act as if they express a common sense". For interpretive communication researchers, these moments of acting as if meaning is truly shared suggest ways that participants are able to coordinate their actions and go on with their everyday lives.

We all go on coordinating our everyday actions because social situations are constrained by rules systems: Rules are general prescriptions for behavior that must be elaborated in context if they are to be applied (Garfinkel, 1967). Communication rules can be formal or unspoken; they can be upheld or violated. Accounts, the reasons we give for deviating from rules, are an important topic for ethnomethodologists and ethnographers (e.g., Bolden & Robinson, 2011; Buttny, 1987, 1993; Hewitt & Stokes, 1975).

Ethnography of speaking (EOS) is sociolinguist Dell Hymes's (1962) method for describing and explaining culturally distinct communication practices and patterns using the SPEAKING acronym as a theoretic framework

+Ethnomethodology+ Ethnomethodology literally means "the people's practices". Ethnomethodology is a sociological tradition that aims to explain and interpret how members who are engaged in social situations make sense of their own and other people's behaviors. If you have lived in more than one culture or in a multicultural setting, you have experienced the process of having to actively make sense of a social situation to go on with mundane, everyday life experiences. Ethnomethodologists assume that people are constantly trying to make enough sense out of a social situation to go on by producing their own appropriate behaviors. In all situations, we must sort out who we are being, to whom we are speaking, and the topic to produce seamless (smooth) interactions.

Ethnomethodology relies on three principles: (a) People assume things are as they appear to be unless there is a good reason to believe otherwise; (b) the knowledge held by people is typically incomplete; and (c) whenever people engage in coordinated actions with others, they usually assume that others see things as they do. Breaching, or deviating from those principles, disturbs everyday life, even though some deviations can be interpreted as meaningful, such as choosing to violate a rule we understand well.

The second test of plausibility is coherence. When you conduct multiple interviews, analyze them, and present your findings in a research report, readers must be able to make sense of how you did each step and exactly when or how you arrived at particular interpretations of the evidence. Again, the quality of your audit trail will facilitate, or work against, you making coherent interpretations of the evidence. If other people (such as your research methods instructor) cannot tell how you arrived at a certain interpretation or if your descriptions of participant realities lack convincing details, then you have failed to represent emic views. In that case, your study will not contribute to practical or theoretic outcomes, and you have disrespected both your participants and your readers by wasting their time.

Even if your audit trail permits you to show exactly how you arrived at certain interpretations and to richly describe participants' meanings, then you still must be cautious about some potential problems with interview evidence. The perspective participants offer during an interview may not be exactly the perspective they employ when they are engaged in interaction for three reasons: First, interviews often allow more time for reflection about behavior than real-time interactions permit. Second, interviews encourage face-saving interpretations of participants' communication competence. Third, questions invite answers, and interviews are always subject to the limitations of the questions you do, and do not, ask.

Consider your levels of theoretical sensitivity and methodological awareness as you select a perspective from which to approach your analysis. If this is your first time analyzing interview evidence, your findings will be more plausible if you have a relatively simple analytic strategy than if you attempt something more sophisticated that you cannot deliver.

Even simple analyses must be systematic. You must use the same steps to make sense of each interview or focus group transcript. Interpretive analysis starts with the hermeneutic circle, moving back and forth between what you see in a transcript and how you describe and interpret that communication. Your analysis can begin as you moderate the interviews and continue as you transcribe them and closely read transcripts over and over. During your first interview, start taking notes about your observations. Transcribe your interviews as soon as possible after you conduct them. Doing so will help you see where you should probe for more information in the next interview or reword a question. Remain aware of your own biases and judgments, and suspend them if possible, as you work through your analysis. Take notes about the biases and judgements you note yourself experiencing. Then, as you analyze more evidence, you will be able to account for differences and similarities in the interviews (constant comparison). Eventually, you should sense that nothing new will be gained by more analysis (i.e., saturation).

Another important aspect of planning your interview questions is to consider how long each interview will last. You will need to estimate time requirements for the IRB and your participants before you recruit them. Consequently, it is a good idea to pilot test your interview questions with someone who is not actually participating in the study or ask a more experienced researcher to help you gauge the time before you conduct interviews.

Finally, you must schedule your interviews and "select dates, times and places that are convenient for the participants" (Krueger & Casey, 2015, p. 91). Think about the participants' lives before you suggest times: Are they responsible for caring for children or other family members? Where and when do they work? What kind of commute will be required for them to come to the interview? Be sure to share your contact information, and collect theirs, so you can deal with unexpected changes that may happen at the last minute.

=CHAPTER 12= Both individual and focus group interviews provide evidence from guided responses, what people say in response to prompt questions or situations

Focus group interviews were once the mainstay of marketing practice, although analytics have replaced the need for some of those studies. Individual and group interviews are used today in media, politics, and business, and they are used frequently by communication scholars as well.

If you interview people or observe communication to analyze how meanings are created in a context, then you may need to collect and analyze some evidence before you can formulate your exact purpose or research question. This is why interpretive and critical researchers tend to consider the evidence element of argument first and only later form their research claim(s).

From the values we discussed earlier in this chapter, you can see how interpretive researchers make arguments that demonstrate multiple plausible realities. These realities are subjective and contextual. In fact, communication critics take the idea of subjective realities one step beyond interpretation when they evaluate communication against some standard. These evaluations may contribute to communication theory, but they also could impact policy decisions or have other pragmatic consequences. Sometimes, communication critics argue that the standards used to evaluate communication need to change.

But whereas the goal of interpretive research is to understand and appreciate communication from participants' perspectives, critical scholars evaluate social structures and ideologies and suggest how they might be changed. An ideology is "a set of ideas that structure a group's reality . . . a code of meanings governing how individuals and groups see the world"

Ideologies greatly influence communication practices and structures. Awareness of a need to change, or perhaps dissatisfaction with some present view or circumstance, is the first precursor to change itself. In critical studies, ideological change often begins with efforts to raise awareness of unjust power relations

Here are two tests by which you can determine adequacy: First, you may choose to exit field data collection when everything in the social situation seems routine and nothing there surprises you. Second, you may recognize that any new data that you collect add little new or useful information to the interpretations or evaluations that you already generated (a.k.a. theoretical saturation; Snow, 1980).

If you are doing close reading of texts, you can apply the same tests to determine adequacy. For instance, if you are evaluating a set of speeches from one political candidate, ask yourself whether your evaluations of the candidate's persuasive strategies will be challenged by considering any additional speeches. Does some other theoretic concept add substantively to your analysis? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then your evidence is not yet adequate. If you do have adequate evidence, then you are ready to consider the coherence of your argument.

You should plan your interviews so that participants will understand your questions, know how to answer them, and be able to do so as honestly as possible. Avoid closed-ended questions (such as those that require a yes or no answer), lengthy questions, and jargon that your participants may not know or do not prefer to use

If you are new to interview research, try writing twice as many questions as you think you will need. Then, ask a more experienced researcher or a practitioner in your industry to help you decide which questions are most likely to engage your participants and which ones seem to best fit your purpose or research question.

If you do not have access to the right sort of participants in some other way, then snowball sampling may be useful. You could begin by inviting one or two people who you know fit your criteria to participate. Then, you could ask those participants to recommend other people who also fit your inclusion/exclusion criteria. If you do not know anyone who fits your criteria, you might ask someone who does know the right kind of people to nominate individuals you could approach about participating. Perhaps there is a list of people who fit your inclusion/exclusion criteria (a.k.a. screens in industry research; Krueger & Casey, 2015). Or you could contact individuals in community organizations to see whether they are willing to assist you in recruiting participants.

If you are recruiting participants on your own, you could place posters in a location frequented by your target participants or post announcements of your study to social media, on radio stations, in newspapers, or using other media sources your intended participants consume and trust. During IRB review, you will need to provide copies of any recruitment materials that you plan to use to locate participants for your study.

Once you select a case to study, sampling people, places, and events to observe within that case is also a factor on which you should reflect. The primary criterion is the opportunity to learn.

If you know what kind of people you want to interview or observe, but you do not want to or cannot begin with someone you already know, then you might use volunteer sampling. In this case, you will develop a recruitment method, such as posting flyers or putting a call out on social media for research participants. Volunteer sampling can work well when many people fit the kind of participant you want to work with and your research question makes it desirable to interview or observe people outside your own social network.

+Interview and Focus Group Claims+ One of the main reasons researchers interview people is to "generate factual information about the world" (Lindlof & Taylor, 2018, p. 221). Journalists, employers, and political pollsters all use interviews in this way. But interviews also help researchers "understand people's experiences, knowledge, and worldviews" and "elicit the language forms used by culture members" (Lindlof & Taylor, 2018, p. 222). Focus group interviews, in particular, assist organizational leaders in making decisions that help to "guide program, policy or service development" by providing different views about behaviors, issues, or concerns (Krueger & Casey, 2015, p. 8). Note that all these purposes primarily involve claims of interpretation. Industry practitioners do use interview studies to support claims of evaluation based on interpretations. But, the proprietary nature of most industry research means that the findings are never shared with people outside that organization or industry.

If you search for interview research using a database such as Communication and Mass Media Complete or Google Scholar, you will find a wealth of resources. Some of those studies include only individual interviews; others include only focus groups. Some researchers combine individual and focus group interviews or combine interviews with other ways of collecting evidence. For instance, ethnographic researchers routinely triangulate interviews with participant-observations and textual analysis (e.g., Y. Y. Kim, Lujan, & Dixon, 1998; Norander & Harter, 2012). Likewise, discourse analysts sometimes interview people in a specific time and place to get evidence about their meanings

Hence, researcher credibility refers to training and experience with close reading of texts, participating and observing communication in context, note-taking, and keeping an audit trail.

If your project is interpretive, you must be able to appreciate and represent multiple realities at the same time that you bracket (set aside) your own understandings to privilege your participants' views. If your work is more critical than interpretive, you will be less likely to set aside your own subjective understandings. Instead, you will warrant your evaluations and suggestions for reform using your own standpoint (i.e., your group memberships and experiences). You will need to be reflexive about why certain interpretations seem plausible and coherent to you and how they might seem implausible or incoherent to someone in a different position. As a critical scholar, revealing your own standpoint will allow others to freely consider the source before choosing to accept (or reject) your ideas. To be a credible humanist scholar, you will need some training and experience. Then, you will need be faithful (dedicated) to doing things right and doing the right things.

+Interpretive Claims+ In doing ethnography, you will try to understand how people in a particular group or culture interpret communication norms and practices. A group is a set of "3-12 people who interact regularly over a period of time and conceive of themselves as a social entity" . By contrast, a culture is a system of shared meanings, or what Geertz (1973) called webs of significance, that are held in common by group members.

In EOS, researchers excavate the interpretations that members of a cultural group share. This can include what members call their speech events and activities, the components of communication that make up those events and activities (e.g., senders, receivers, message forms, channels), and their functions (e.g., rituals, celebrations, routines). To conduct EOS, you will use the SPEAKING framework developed by sociolinguist Dell Hymes.

Interpretive claims help us understand others' communication from their point of view. Maybe you wonder how your online presence will influence your future job searches or how your company's online presence will influence sales. Perhaps you are interested in great speeches given at important times in history or generally intrigued by the concept of persuasion. In each of these cases, you are engaging in the first step in the process of making an interpretive claim.

In many studies, interpretive claims depend on three dimensions or levels of data collection: the observational domain, the interpretive schemes, and relations between observations. At the first level, you might make a claim about what is occurring in communication—verbal/nonverbal, face to face/mediated, ritualized/unscripted, and so forth. At this first level, you will use your claim to interpret action by identifying and labeling what is occurring.

One relationship you can study with EC, autoethnography, or performance ethnography is the communal function of communication, that is, how communication is used to create and affirm shared identities. Figure 13.3 contains sample claims about the communal function of communication. Note that communication can serve a different communal function for cultural insiders than for outsiders (e.g., Murillo, 1996). You could use autoethnography or performance ethnography to describe the communication code used in your own speech communities

In our global and multicultural world, studies of codeswitching, mixing the rules of one speech community with the rules of another, are especially relevant for intercultural communication researchers. Codeswitching is frequently studied with ethnographic and discourse analytic methods

Note that observing people, even in public places, has ethical implications for their right to freely choose to participate in research, as well as respecting their privacy.

In terms of texts as sources of data, quantitative content analysts randomly select large samples of texts from a message population and then categorize those messages using some prespecified coding scheme. However, content analysis can be used for interpretive and critical purposes as well. If you aim to conduct interpretive content analysis, you might induce themes from textual evidence to infer meanings in a particular context. If your content analysis is more critically oriented, you would then evaluate those meanings or and suggest how they should be different. Inductively analyzing and evaluating meanings in textual evidence is very different than using a prespecified coding scheme to deductively explain or predict what kinds of messages occur most frequently. The former involves a claim of interpretation or evaluation and assumes that meanings are contextual; the latter entails an explanatory claim and assumes an objective reality that can be discovered, more or less independent of context.

+Preferred Sources of Evidence+ Humanist researchers use all the same sources of evidence that social scientists use, including self- and other-reports, texts, and directly observing communicators in action. But because interpretive and critical researchers make different kinds of claims, using different reasoning patterns (inductive vs. deductive), they tend to use these sources of evidence differently.

Individual interviews are one-on-one interactions between a researcher and a participant. Interviews may be more or less structured and formal. Focus group interviews "usually consist of 5 to 10 people who, with a moderator, discuss a series of topics or questions that are more focused than in casual group interaction

The last test of plausibility is to engage in some form of negative case analysis. Consider what counterclaims or other possible interpretations might be supportable with your evidence. For instance, when you are doing open coding, or combining your initial codes into categories, be sure to note instances of evidence that do not fit into your codes or categories. Could you modify your categories (or their definitions) to account for that evidence? Also, if there are many codes that do not fit into any of your categories, perhaps your overall category scheme does not adequately account for your data (Agar, 1983). Try playing with more than one category scheme to see which one better fits your entire set of interview data. Collaboration with other researchers can help you increase plausibility by letting people with different methodological, theoretic, and analytic expertise provide feedback about your codes and categories (see D. O. Braithwaite, Allen, & Moore, 2017, on data conferencing).

Inductive, iterative research will make it difficult for you to determine when you have adequate evidence and plausible, coherent interpretations of that evidence. While saturation should guide you with regard to adequacy and plausibility, it is best to ask other people to evaluate the coherence of your study. Academic scholars benefit from the peer-review process inherent in submitting research to professional association meetings and scholarly journals. In industry research, interview studies are subject to less public scrutiny because proprietary researchers aim to preserve competitive advantage by not sharing their findings or methods with people outside their organization. In such cases, organizational leaders, industry best practices, and, to a lesser extent, external audiences will determine whether the tests of adequacy, coherence, and negative case analysis are sufficient to merit using the findings (e.g., Hourani et al., 2017).

=CHAPTER 11=The communication field has roots in both the humanities and the social sciences. quantitative social scientists value objectivity. They explain and predict communication using deductive reasoning based on accurate, consistent numerical measurements. Interpretive and critical communication researchers, however, explicitly value subjective ways of knowing about communication. Their arguments for multiple plausible realities employ inductive reasoning, starting with a few specific instances, or cases of communication, from which claims to interpret, evaluate, or reform communication meanings are derived. The purpose of interpretive and critical arguments is to promote understanding and, sometimes, to evaluate and change communication meanings.

Interpretation and criticism are humanistic modes of inquiry, in which experiences, more so than facts, are of primary interest .The preferred kinds of evidence for interpretive and critical scholarship are words and symbols, rather than numerical measurements. Humanistic research differs from scientific research in the kinds of questions asked, the methods used to explore those questions, and the standards that determine what counts as good scholarship.

Interviewing people helps academics and industry practitioners make arguments for multiple communication realities. Interviews enrich understandings of meaning, beyond what we can learn from the facts alone, as they are given by content analyses of messages, quantitative survey responses, or digital analytics.

Interview research helps academic researchers understand and theorize communication from participants' points of view. Your purpose might be to interpret people's meanings in a specific context or to evaluate communication in that context.

+Moderating the Interviews+ If you are collaborating with other researchers to conduct interviews, choose the investigator with whom your participants will feel most comfortable talking. Whose empathy and communication competence will help them elicit honest, sometimes risky, responses from participants? The moderator must know about the topic beyond the questions on the interview protocol. That way, he or she will know when to probe for more information, what terms to use, and how to recognize when participants are evading, or misunderstanding, a question

It can be useful to have more than one moderator or to have one person lead the interview discussion while another observes and takes notes (e.g., Koenig et al., 2016). This strategy can help you capture nonverbal behaviors and start noticing some of your initial interpretations during the interviews themselves.

To start appreciating different forms of ethnography, you can first distinguish between macro- and microethnography , Macroethnography involves years of field research across different communities or settings. Microethnography refers to studies of much shorter duration, usually focused on a single social situation or institution. Although you cannot conduct macroethnography in one research methods class, you may be able to do a microethnographic project that is "no less sophisticated, but only more limited in scope". Your general purpose will be the same, to "discover the cultural knowledge people are using to organize their behavior and interpret their experience".

It is a short step from interpreting behavior and experience to evaluating them or thinking about how they might be reformed. For that reason, ethnographic research in communication can bridge the interpretive and critical paradigms. Four forms of ethnographic communication research include ethnography of speaking and ethnography of communication (typically interpretive methods), along with autoethnography and performance ethnography (typically critical methods). Before we define each type of ethnography, you must know something about the origins of interpretive field research in ethnomethodology.

+Presenting Interview Evidence in a Research Report+ One of the ways that you can show that you value subjectivity is to allow your participants' voices to permeate your research report. Choose quotations from your interview transcripts that illustrate your initial codes and their broader categories. It is customary in interpretive research to allow a large portion of your manuscript to be devoted to participant quotes. To protect confidentiality, you will need to mask your participants' names with pseudonyms or identification numbers. For practicality, you should mark each excerpt with the interview date, some indication of where the quote happened in the interview, and perhaps other cues that will help readers follow your interpretations.

It is a very good idea to include some of your interview questions in the methods section of your research report, or you could attach your entire interview protocol there as an appendix. At a minimum, you should indicate the kinds of questions you asked.

Praxis is one of the three types of knowledge described by Aristotle. Praxis deals with the wise use of theoretical knowledge in social action. If your communication scholarship causes other people to change how they understand and evaluate communication or leads them to communicate differently, then your work has impact. If your scholarship results in a shift in how other researchers theorize communication processes or practices, you have impacted your community of peers. Impact is especially valued by rhetorical and critical communication scholars. In fact, research universities use something called an impact factor, a numerical rating of scholarly journals that is based on their readership and how often their articles are cited (on average), when deciding whether to award faculty members tenure and promotion.

Making coherent arguments about communicators' realities, arguments that are reflexively linked to your own standpoint, can help make other people aware of ineffective or unfair communication practices. Doing so might help to establish a need for social change. In fact, some early critical paradigm studies, especially those from the Frankfort School in Germany after World War II, were based on the hope that interpreting and evaluating oppressive ideologies would reduce their power. The idea was that people who were formerly unaware of their relative privileges (or oppressive practices) would, once they became aware, begin to make different, more equitable choices.

If you are doing interpretive field research using interviews or participant-observation in a field setting, then you will prioritize your participants' subjective understandings of communication over your own meanings. But if you are conducting critical communication research, then your own subjective evaluations of the evidence are desirable and valuable. If other people disagree with your evaluations or ideas about what social meanings or practices ought to be changed, they are free to resist your ideas in a variety of ways or ignore them altogether

One way that you can value subjectivity is to study communication as it occurs when there is no research being done. For example, ethnographers prefer interviewing and observing people's communication in the field over online surveys or laboratory settings for collecting data. Unstructured conversations between the researcher and participants in a field setting preserve an emic view of culture, that is, the understandings and ways of communicating best known to in-group members .The term emic comes from anthropology, where an etic view of culture refers to knowledge or patterns of behavior that are equally available to an outside observer.

The main difference between EOS and EC is that EC researchers may not use Hymes's. SPEAKING framework. Instead, they use a more general term, communication code, a set of rules for speaking and interpreting others' speech. SPEAKING framework is only one way to articulate the elements of a communication code. Ethnographers of Communication also explore patterns such as greeting rituals, communication styles, speech activities, and speech events

Over the past 15 years or so, many more communication researchers have begun using autoethnography. Autoethnography (a.k.a. narrative ethnography, Goodall, 2004; Tillman, 2009a) is the analysis of a social setting or situation that connects "the personal to the cultural" (Ellis & Bochner, 2003) and emphasizes artistic, or aesthetic communication. Like researchers in EOS and EC, autoethnographers rely on systematic gathering and analysis of field data from people involved in genuine life experiences, which can be done at the micro- or macroethnographic level. But in autoethnography the interpretive paradigm values of subjectivity and rich description are extended to include voicing the researcher's own lived experiences; that is, the researcher is the key informant (e.g., Crawford, 1996; R. A. Griffin, 2012; Pelias, 2003; Tillman, 2009b). Because of autoethnographers' emphasis on their own embodied experiences in interpreting communication and their suggestions about how communication might be reformed to work more equitably for all participants, the majority of those studies better fit the assumptions of the critical paradigm than those of the interpretive paradigm.

Autoethnographic writing is also quite different from the interpretive research reports typically found for EOS and EC studies. According to Ellis and Bochner. "Usually written in first-person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms—short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose"

Performance ethnography builds on EOS, EC, and autoethnography as ways of studying culture and communication. Performance ethnography is an explicitly critical method that goes beyond interpreting participants' cultural meanings to representing them in public performances and performative writing. Performance ethnographers evaluate cultural meanings and work to "make sites of oppression visible". Sometimes, that means working with community members to create and stage artistic performances of communication that make other people aware of what communication means to members or how communication is serving some members' interests over other's.

A speech community is a group of people who share rules for using and interpreting speech (Romaine, 1982). Researchers using EC refer to those rules as the communication code. For example, Kotani's (2017) EC showed how Japanese speakers encountered unfamiliar codes when speaking with U.S. Americans and how, through difficult interactions, members of both groups expanded their speech communities and negotiated the other group's codes.

Philipsen's (1975) influential study of male role enactment in an urban setting (Teamsterville) is the EOS best known among communication scholars. Subsequent EOS and EC researchers studied organizational groups in a television station (Carbaugh, 1988), a charismatic church (Sequeira, 1993), a regional symphony (Ruud, 1995), a group of Vietnam veterans (C. Braithwaite, 1997c), and houseless street youth (Dollar & Zimmers, 1998). More recently, EC researchers explored Latino/Latina (e.g., Aoki, 2000; Moreman & Persona Non Grata, 2011; Witteborn et al., 2013), African American (M. Morgan, 2010), and Native American speech communities (Covarrubias, 2007, 2008). Today, a speech community can exist online and not in one geographic place, as was the case for the speech communities studied by cultural ethnographers and anthropologists prior to this century (e.g., see Petersen's 2009 study of online social support groups for men living with HIV). The authors in each of these studies interpreted the distinct knowledge used by members of a cultural group to speak and to be understood by others.

In addition to frequency, think about your interviewees' forcefulness of expression, using cues like increased volume, rate, or intonation changes to indicate that the participants are especially passionate or are emphasizing what they are saying. Frequency (repetition and recurrence) and forcefulness suggest meanings that are important to participants (Owen, 1984). Hence, consider both when you are grouping initial codes into broader categories.

Remember, your decisions about analyzing interview evidence are emergent ones. It is fine to make a tentative plan before you begin doing interviews and then adapt it as you conduct the interviews, transcribe them, and analyze your recordings, notes, and transcripts for patterns of meaning. Each iteration in your analytic process will add to your interpretations (hermeneutic circle) until you reach saturation. Only then are you ready to finalize the methods section and craft the findings segment of your research report.

If unjust power relations are widely accepted (even unnoticed) by people in a given time or place, then the ideology is hegemonic.Hegemony occurs "when events or texts are interpreted in a way that promotes the interests of one group over those of another". Thus, the basic form of argument for critical communication research is to demonstrate the ideological need for change, due to hegemonic oppression, and to assert that all members of a society should share equal rights and privileges

Researchers use evaluative claims to argue for the worth or importance of a social practice or communication behavior. For example, just as critical discourse analysts interpret and evaluate language-in-use, rhetorical critics interpret and evaluate persuasion, including language use and symbolic processes. These kinds of scholarship can be adapted to better fit the assumptions of either the interpretive or critical paradigm.

Ethnographers and ethnomethodologists perform negative case analysis to evaluate their initial interpretations developed in the field while still collecting and analyzing participant-observations, interviews, artifacts, and field notes. Member checks and performance tests are two ways ethnographers and interview researchers look for negative cases

Researchers use member checks to ask some participants to verify their interpretation of what is happening or what it means to members. With performance tests, researchers must embody the communication they are interpreting and see whether other participants respond in ways that suggest their cultural competence

Some interpretive and critical researchers use network or snowball sampling because that method is the best way of locating people or messages whose meaning they wish to interpret or critique.

Snowball sampling is often purposive, since participants are selected because of particular characteristics (e.g., another public servant). Instagram users are likely to know other Instragrammers, just as people who have any one characteristic often know others who share that characteristic. Snowball sampling is a great selection method to use when you want to study members of an underrepresented population who may only be accessible through one another's recommendations (e.g., domestic violence survivors).

Interpretive researchers view truth as subjective, although not wholly individual. Instead, some collective truths can be ascertained by social agreement, even when that agreement is relatively stable or unstable. Truth is therefore subject to the interpretations of human actors. This is one reason interpretive scholars make every effort to include multiple perspectives in their work:

So, an interpretive paradigm view of truth is one that is grounded in social agreement at particular times and places. If you seek to demonstrate multiple realities from the viewpoint of members in a particular social situation, it is practical to value those members' rich, subjective descriptions, to emphasize our credibility as researchers, and to call attention to the plausibility and the transferability of our interpretations as measures of their worth.

Communication scholars who embrace the critical and interpretive paradigms tend to agree that no one thing is true for all people, at all times, in all places. But critical scholars are far more likely to emphasize the idea that truths are political, or power related, in addition to being subjective

So, when you aim to evaluate and reform communication practices, processes, or ideologies, being reflexive about your own positionality and considering how your work will impact other scholars, industry practitioners, or people in general are important and sensible ways to increase the value of your research or creative work.

+Coherence+ Arguments about multiple plausible realities require clear, logical connections between the claims and evidence. Thus, the second standard you can use to evaluate whether findings are plausible is coherence, the degree to which arguments are logical, consistent, and intelligible to others. Whether your project includes closely reading texts and artifacts, interviews, or observations or some combination of these strategies, you must achieve coherence by making clear, convincing links between the evidence you analyze and your claim(s).

Some specific steps that you might take to create a coherent argument include noting patterns or themes across aspects of a text (or sources of evidence), clustering similar concepts together, making metaphors, counting, drawing comparisons, subsuming particulars into a general interpretation, and building a logical chain of evidence (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). Each of these techniques is a way to synthesize particular bits of evidence into some broader interpretation or evaluation: Using inductive reasoning in these ways will help you "maintain faithfulness to the empirical data while abstracting and generalizing from a relatively small number of cases" (Bulmer, 1979, p. 661). It also will help you convey your detailed understanding of some communication to people who have not experienced that situation, that time, or that place.

Theoretical sensitivity is also important, because sometimes "the method is the theory," especially when you are interpreting and evaluating certain kinds of evidence (Madison, 2005, p. 18). If you triangulate multiple investigator viewpoints, then each researcher's theoretical sensitivities will contribute to your collective understandings of the communication that you study.

The more developed your awareness of method and theory, the better tuned you will be as a research instrument and the better choices you are likely to make as you conduct research. Think about one thing that you know how to do very well: let's say it is giving a speech or writing a social media post. When you first learned it, you probably had to concentrate more than you do now, and you probably did it more slowly at first. But once you know something very well, you do it more effectively, faster, and with less exclusive concentration. The skills associated with researcher-as-instrument are something like that: It takes some specific knowledge of procedures (which you get from training) and some practice in context (which you get from experience) to be effective. Even highly trained and experienced scholars must consider their degree of membership in a social setting to develop good claims and evidentiary support for those claims.

Because interpretive researchers and communication critics build arguments inductively, they approach research design differently than do quantitative social scientists. For interpretive researchers, designing a study is an unfolding process that moves back and forth between data collection and analysis many times. In field research, your design will include identifying (or recruiting) key informants to observe and/or interview and developing interview questions and observation strategies, including ways to take notes or videotape communicators in action. Ethnographers, in particular, combine interviewing key informants with observing communication in a field setting over a long time. But emergent research designs also are useful in industry research (e.g., when stakeholder views change quickly in response to an organizational crisis or when evaluations of trending topics shift over time).

The process of moving back and forth between what you are observing and your descriptions and interpretations of communication, then changing those descriptions and interpretations as you uncover emerging patterns of communication, is referred to as the hermeneutic circle. Note that your descriptions and interpretations of a text might differ from the descriptions and interpretations offered by one of your classmates: You and your classmates have different subjective experiences that influence your understandings. When you use hermeneutic reasoning, you will have to consider why a message or artifact seems to mean what it does to you. Then, what does it mean to some other person(s)? How do you account for the difference? This kind of analysis is sometimes referred to as close reading of texts.

he strategy of analytic induction, a way to test claims through an "active, procedurally diverse search for counter-examples" .Analytic induction is used when you already have interview, observation, or textual data at hand. You could begin your analytic induction by collecting several examples of the communication phenomena or practice that you want to interpret or evaluate. As you gather examples, try to work from the specific features or properties of each one toward some more general account of the examples as a set. Once you have a coherent general account of how that practice works, look for instances of the practice that do not fit your understanding of the practice so far. When you have diligently searched for such instances and adapted your interpretations or evaluations to account for those cases, your argument will be complete.

The second basic analytic strategy for interpretive and critical scholars is the grounded-theory approach developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Charmaz (1990, 2006). Like analytic induction, grounded theory begins with your noting specific cases of communication and collecting a set of similar cases. But more so than analytic induction, grounded theory "entails an iterative, reflective process that moves back and forth between the data and categories so that the findings are theoretically grounded within the data" (Pepper & Larson, 2006, p. 56). Grounded theory analysis begins with purposive selection of who, what, and when to observe. If you use a grounded-theory approach, your analysis will begin during data collection and guide all your subsequent questions and collection of evidence.

Establishing rapport with key informants is essential if you are to collect good ethnographic interview data. Rapport means that the people you interview and observe feel comfortable with you and trust you. They do not see you as naive, "or an easy target for deception". Your demeanor and appearance, your listening skills, and your nonverbal style all contribute to your effectiveness as a human research instrument during the interview process. Your claim to interpret or evaluate participants' communication will be less credible if the participants change their behaviors or edit their messages when you are present.

There are three main forms of ethnographic interviews: oral history, personal narratives, and topical interviews. Oral history interviews are "a recounting of a social historical moment reflected in the life or lives of individuals who remember them and/or experienced them. Personal narratives are stories that provide "an individual perspective and expression of an event, experience, or point of view". Finally, topical interviews function to gather "the point of view given to a particular subject, such as a program, an issue, or a process" .

The steps you take to create a coherent argument will depend on your claim. If your evidence for ideological domination comes from the subjective views of people in a particular time, place, and social group, then you must show that you have the interpretive credibility to represent those views competently.

There is one important difference in the way that interpretive and critical scholars think about coherence. Interpretive field researchers and some rhetorical critics concentrate on making consistent, well-reasoned links between their evidence and claims. But critical studies scholars always ask, "Consistent for whom?" Critical paradigm scholars' "essays are driven by a particular objective—to expose how structures challenge, disrupt, produce, maintain, and/or reproduce oppressive power relations" (K. Foss & Foss, 2013, p. 530). Thus, critical scholars assume that what is coherent to dominant group members will be different than what seems most apparent, logical, or reasonable to members of marginalized groups (Lears, 1985).

Interpretive researchers and communication critics, however, study communication that varies by context. So, your interpretive or critical project may begin with a single instance of talk or a communication artifact, any object made by humans, that piques your curiosity. Noticing something interesting in a specific context becomes the starting point for your project.

What you do after noticing something interesting will differ somewhat, depending on which research methodology you use. For rhetorical and critical analyses, you might start by thinking about the standards used to interpret some talk or to evaluate an artifact. In this way, you will be applying theoretic concepts to the communication you want to study. You will need to review previously published scholarship to know how that talk (or that artifact) has been treated by other scholars.

+Participant Observation+ Your involvement in the communication you choose to study may be somewhat detached (i.e., you are just there to observe), or you may be an active participant who is helping to create the communication in that cultural setting or situation. Your degree of participation will depend on your purpose and the kind of access you have to the field setting.

Whatever your degree of participation during observations, it is important that you develop and maintain trusting relationships with the group members you study. Your access to participants' knowledge will depend on the kinds of relationships you have, or establish, with group members. The roles that your key informants play in their local networks, and their goals in relating to you, will influence your degree of participation and the observations you are able to collect.

Your study of textual evidence could incorporate narrative discourse, where one speaker has most or all of the responsibility for what is said. Or your study might include interactive discourse, where participants share responsibility for speaking more or less evenly. Interactive discourse is the hallmark of CA and interview studies. Discourse analysts study both narrative and interactive texts, as do ethnographers and critical scholars. The point here is that speaker responsibility and audience are important aspects of communication context; both matter in terms of the difficulty and ethics of collecting evidence and for analysis.

When we think of textual data for communication research studies, we also must include texts that are symbolic, performed, and purely visual or pictorial Consider all the different kinds of texts that you might want to interpret or critique; this might include blog entries and social media comments, chat room discourse, diaries, maps, photographs, poetry, or prose. It also could include symbolic texts such as architecture, gestures or signs, or even ways of using space.

After you have selected a topic and perhaps collected some initial participant-observations and informal interviews, you can start thinking about your research questions. As you write some general questions and review them, you will be clarifying your theoretical and methodological assumptions. Keeping detailed notes about those ideas will help you determine the choices you should make during data collection and analysis (and performance, if applicable). At this stage, you will do well to read quantitative social science, interpretive, and critical paradigm studies about your topic because all those perspectives will inform your observations and interviews and because understanding those multiple views is consistent with an interpretive paradigm view about the nature of reality (i.e., multiple plausible truths exist about any topic).

When you have a list of potential research questions about the situation or setting you want to examine, and after you have conducted an initial literature review, try writing the questions on note cards and sorting them in different ways to see how a structured set of interview questions might emerge. If you have more than four or five questions, try grouping them into major questions and subquestions. According to Miles and Huberman (1994), "drafting and iterating a set of six or seven general research questions should take at least 2 or 3 hours" (p. 25). Your questions are likely to improve if you do this work in more than one sitting.

+Selecting and Recruiting Participants+ Whether you use purposive, snowball, or volunteer selection, you must think about inclusion and exclusion criteria, the characteristics participants must have (or not have) to qualify for participation in a study. First, think about what would make someone knowledgeable about your topic.

When you know exactly what kind of people you want to interview, you are ready to find those people and invite them to participate in your research. Communication researchers in health-care, media, and political industries often hire professional recruiting firms to solicit participation from the kinds of people they want to interview

+Faithfulness+ To be faithful means to remain constant or steadfast. You can demonstrate faithfulness by your steadfast efforts to engage in close reading of texts and artifacts and your prolonged engagement in the field.

When you observe and listen carefully to research participants over weeks or months of observations or interviews, you are being steadfast. When you wait until participants in a setting know and trust you before choosing key informants for your interviews or asking them interview questions, you are being faithful. Each step you take to make careful observations, document, organize and store your field notes, and analyze all the evidence repeatedly helps to ensure that your interpretations are plausible.

Rhetorical scholars tend to study artifacts, objects made by humans, as texts. This includes speeches. But, a short list of artifacts also could include mobile devices, clothing, hairstyle, product packaging, automobiles, weapons, or other material possessions. As a critic, you will select a particular text or artifact for its relation to a theoretic concept. Then, you will engage in very close reading of that text to explore its meanings, functions, or importance in a specific context. We

Whether you study communication using interviews, observations, close reading of texts, or some combination of those sources, your next important decision will be how to select the evidence for your project.

An audit trail consists of several types of documentation, including (a) raw data or evidence; (b) any data reduction and analysis products, such as lists or classification schemes; (c) data reconstruction and synthesis products, such as models or theoretic frameworks; (d) process notes related to the setting, including permission agreements with participants; (e) materials relating to your own intentions and moods; and (f) instrument development information such as interview guides

Without an audit trail, you can amass a warehouse of evidence, but be unable to make coherent sense of it. Even if your own sense of it is coherent, you will not be able to convey it convincingly to others without having a clear audit trail. Your notes from close readings of texts and artifacts, participant-observation, and interviews will help you track where you got your interpretations and evaluations. Your audit trail also will document exactly what evidence led you to those meanings and when.

Researchers who work to interpret and critique textual data also value subjectivity. But they enact that value somewhat differently than do ethnographers or focus group interviewers.

You can prioritize rich description by thinking about the kinds and amount of evidence you collect and by the ways you depict evidence in a research report or critical essay (e.g., providing quotations from participants' talk is customary in interview studies, ethnography, and discourse analytic research). Rich descriptions are best achieved when you are immersed in a social situation, or when you analyze texts, over a long period of time. Being deeply immersed in a setting or doing very close reading of texts allows you to understand that evidence as fully as possible. It also helps you to consider how the situation or text you are analyzing compares with other situations or texts.

Interview studies rely on participants' open, honest sharing of information. So, it is important to think about what will make your participants comfortable enough to share their experiences and interpretations. If scheduling, status differences, or topics of discussion suggest that your participants would be more comfortable answering questions with you alone, then individual interviews may be best

You may want to combine individual interviews with focus groups. If so, you will need to consider how the sequence of those interviews might matter. Should you begin with focus groups or with some individual interviews? For instance, you may want participants to generate interpretations during individual interviews that can be built on later, in focus groups. If some of your participants have specific expertise or membership in the context you want to study, then doing individual interviews first can help you understand their realities, and see how shared they may be, during a subsequent focus group interview.

During the interview itself, use your memory or audio- or videotape recording and take notes to capture what the participants say and do. Afterward, you will at least need to write down the date and time of the interview, its location, the type and number of participants, and the name of the moderator for your audit trail.

You may want to transcribe tape-recorded interviews before proceeding with data analysis. Researchers in most focus group and interview studies do not transcribe with same the level of detail or rigor that conversation analysts

As you moderate and transcribe your own interviews, you will start to notice things that seem important in your evidence. This generally happens in two phases, open coding and categorizing. Open coding "is the initial, unrestricted coding of data," whereas categorizing is "sorting units of data with respect to the properties or features they have in common" (Lindlof & Taylor, 2018, p. 315). To accomplish open coding, you will write notes directly onto your transcripts that describe individual units of evidence (e.g., sentences, phrases, topics). Then, you will look for ways to group those initial codes into larger categories, usually because they share something in common.

Your codes and categories might come from some communication theory or prior research .Or they might be categories that you develop. Perhaps some of your codes and categories will be suggested by past research, whereas others are ones you noted that add to what has been reported or theorized already. To start looking for patterns across your initial codes, observe which codes occur frequently via repetition or recurrence (Owen, 1984). You will notice some codes because of their repetition, when one or more interviewees use the same term or phrase or bring up the same topic repeatedly. Sometimes, you will see recurrence of an idea (i.e., different words are used, but mean something similar). You will constantly compare your transcripts to see repetition within an interview and recurrence across interviews.