Research Methods - Introduction and Ch. 1: What is research?

quantity

- "how much?" or "how many?" - count only certain things, not everything example: numbers, magnitude, and measurement

quality

- "of what kind?" example: text's properties, degree of excellence, and distinguishing characteristics

Qualitative Researchers

- "reading into" texts things that are not there or of having opinions or making interpretations that seem odd, excessive, or even idiosyncratic

system 2 (slow)

- Allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. - The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration - the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do

binary oppositions

- It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms such as rich and poor, happy and sad - oppositions establish relationships in various areas, and it is through relationships that we find meaning

system 1 (fast)

- Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control

"perspectivism"

- a notion that informs much postmodern theory

cultural criticism

- a number of focal points - everything is connected to everything else, which is meant to suggest that each of the focal points may have an influence on each or all of the others

small group

- a person teaching a class - interpersonal communication cannot take place

Quantitative Researchers

- accused of being too narrow, basing their research on what they can count, measure, and observe and neglecting other matters

friedrich nietzsche

- believed that everything boils down to interpretation - we cannot know facts, only perspectives - "no limit to the ways the world can be interpreted"

interpersonal

- between ourselves and a relatively small number of people - conversations with friends at dinner - interaction among all parties

evidence

- comes from research - how good that research is? - how reliable is that research?

synchronic studies

- comparative studies - change over distance - differences between one place and another - horizontal axis example: the way people do things in the US and the way people do things in some other country

quantitative research

- counts, measures - processes collected data - focuses on incidences of X in texts - statistical - describes, explains, and predicts - leads to a hypothesis or theory - methodology can be attacked

qualitative researchers

- deal with important social, political, and economic matters, and use concepts and theories from psychoanalytic thought - yield interesting ideas but are highly speculative and do not give certainty

cultural studies

- eliminates the boundaries between elite arts and popular arts, but what it represents, is really a formalization of what people who had been studying the mass media and popular culture were already doing - investigates everything from elite fiction to comics, television, films, music, and everyday life

qualitative research

- evaluates - uses concepts to explicate - focuses on aesthetics in texts - theoretical - interprets - leads to an evaluation - interpretation can be attacked

social media sites

- facebook, twitter, and pinterest

oppositions vs negation

- healthy and unhealthy is a negation - healthy and sick is an opposition

diachronic studies

- historical studies - change over time - between an earlier time and a later time - vertical axis example: the way we did things earlier and the way we do things now

organizational

- how organizations communicate to members of the organization and to other interested parties

data man (quantative)

- information - the mean - N=8 - quantitative - ingenuity in design - focus on audience - statistics - quantifiable subjects - certainty but triviality - getting data a problem - American pragmatic tradition - counts all grains of sand in the universe

data-free man (qualitative)

- interpretation - the meaning - N=1 - qualitative - ingenuity in analysis - focus on artwork (text) - concepts from various domains - subjects useful for theorizing - uncertainty but significance - getting ideas a problem - European philosophical tradition - sees the universe in a grain of sand

five aspects of communication

1. intrapersonal 2. interpersonal 3. small group 4. organizational 5. mass media

analogous problem

see things not "from both sides now" but sometimes from 5 to 10 sides, points of view, or disciplinary perspectives

Philosophical Theory

which concerns itself with matters such as how we know about the world, the status of knowledge, ethical issues, and principles of reasoning and logic

Aesthetic Theory

which deals with how lighting, color, cutting, sound, music, camera shots, and related matters generate ideas, feelings, and emotions in audiences

Sociological Theory

which deals with institutions and groups and matters such as race, gender, religion, and class

Semiotic Theory

which deals with signs and how we find meaning in phenomena such as films, songs, fashions, advertisements, and so on

Psychoanalytic Theory

which deals with unconscious elements in our thinking and behavior

Comparative Theory

which deals, when considering media, with how a given text (such as the film Skyfall) or other phenomena are perceived and the role that a given text plays in different societies and cultures

Anthropological Theory

which focuses on culture and the enculturation process by which people are taught to fit into their cultures

Literary Theory

which investigates how literacy works (of all kinds) generate their effects, the various artistic devices writers use, and the role that "readers" play

Historiography Theory

which studies change over time --- what happened, how it happened, and theories and suggestions about why it happened

everyday research

- intuitive - common sense - casual - spur of the moment - selective (often) - magical thinking - flawed thinking at times - focus is personal decisions - ignoring information that wouldn't support your research or your wishes - very casual in our methods and when we want to convince ourselves that something we want to do should be dome - involves personal matters - not a matter of seeking truth but of finding support and justification

research

- means "to search for, to find" and comes from the Latin re (again) and from cercier (to search) - looking for information about something

control group

- nothing is done

quantitative researchers

- often use sophisticated statistical methods - deal with relatively trivial matters

mass media

- radio, television, film, and other media - a sender of messages to a large number of receivers of messages

narrative fallacies

- showing how flawed stories of the past shape our view of the world and our expectations of the future

experimental group

- something is done

intrapersonal

- talking to ourselves - thinking about how we will respond to situations we expect to arise - writing in a journal or diary

three "superheroes"

- the man without quantities - data-free man - the secret agent

independent variable

- the thing that is done to the experimental group

scholarly research

- theory based - structured - systematic - planned - objective - scientific thinking - logical to the extent possible - focus is knowledge about reality - seeks truth and accepts info that runs counter to one's wished and desires

selective inattention

- we neglect information that might convince us that a course of action we want to take is wrong

magical thinking

- wishing makes it so example: we can, through force of will, cause something to happen