Media and Communication Research Methods

Anders Hansen, David Machin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137589637
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306646
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This essential textbook provides a clear and authoritative introduction to qualitative and quantitative methods for studying media and communication. Written by two highly experienced researchers, the book draws on a wide range of media and communication research to introduce students to the relative strengths of the different research approaches. Beginning with an overview of the changing contexts and trends in media and communication research approaches, the book demystifies 'research' and the 'research process' by offering practical and accessible guidance on how to design, plan and carry out successful research projects in media and communication. This is an indispensable text for all students of media and communication studies, particularly those undertaking their own research projects or taking modules in research methods.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

These are exciting times for studying the central role of media and communications in our everyday social, political and cultural lives. Never before have communications media and technologies been so integral to everything that we do. And never before, it seems, has the pace of change in our media and communications environment been so rapid and dramatic as in the present era. There are new possibilities, new opportunities and indeed new challenges for research; and, as before, the need to study, understand and make sense of the context and role of media and communications in the social, political and cultural dynamics of society. The aim of this book is to introduce some of the key ways of – and methods for – doing so, while also showing the importance of historical context for understanding media and communications technologies themselves as well as the theories and methods by which we make sense of them. With this chapter, we start with an outline of media and communication research, and the relationship between research methods and theory in the study of media and communications. This is followed by a brief overview of the structure of the book and the contents of individual chapters.

Research methods do not, and never should, exist in isolation from theory. Media and communication research methods are no exception, but the point is possibly more important to make for the field of media and communication research than for some other and longer-established fields or disciplines. The simple reason for this is that media and communication research, rather than being a well-defined discipline, is a sprawling and multidisciplinary field of research approaches and theories, drawing inspiration from a wide range of disciplines across the humanities, the social sciences and even the sciences. Far from being a weakness, this has in fact proved to be one of its major strengths: a productive impetus to continuous development and adaptation to what have historically been rapid changes in the nature and application of media technologies as well as political and social concerns with communications media.

The aim of this book is to provide an introduction to selected key research methods, approaches and tools for the study of media and ­communications. We introduce methods which we have found in our own research and teaching to be the most productive and appropriate for ­addressing core questions about the role of media and communications within wider social, political and cultural contexts. Our perspective is principally ­sociological, although – as will be evident throughout the book – the ­methods and approaches introduced here draw inspiration from a broad range of ­disciplines.

The emphasis throughout is to provide a ‘how to’ guide to addressing research questions in media and communication research, with examples of how each method has been used and how it fits into the wider historical context and development of the field. Each of the methods introduced in the book can be used on its own, but a common theme throughout is also to emphasise the potentially significant gains from combining methods in a mixed methods design. Thus, as we shall see, many of the most successful and prominent models of media and communication have been based on research combining methods for analysing public communication in its full social context.

Mapping the field of media and communication research

Even a cursory glance at introductions to media and communication research will quickly reveal that there are many approaches that can be taken, and many principles that can be used, to categorise and map this broad field of enquiry. Some approach this from a strictly method-driven perspective, often within a broad distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods and with the individual method as their starting point and organising principle. Others approach it from a theory-driven perspective, discussing the particular (and often multiple) methods that have been applied in research guided by each specific theory. Still others take a media-driven approach, focusing in turn on the methods and theories which have been used in research on each individual medium (film, television, newspapers, radio, advertising, etc.). Many use a mixture of these organising perspectives, and furthermore attempt to place their discussion of methods and approaches in chronological and historical context.

As the late James Halloran – one of the pioneers of communication research in the UK – insisted (e.g. Halloran, 1998), research methods cannot and should not be discussed or understood in isolation from the theories, models and socio-political concerns which have guided media and communication research. Likewise, neither method nor theory can be understood in isolation from the technological and economic possibilities and arrangements, or from the social and political struggles and concerns, which characterise different historical periods. A sense of the wider historical, disciplinary and political context of media and communication research thus helps in appreciating that just as each method has its own history, so too is its use, application, development and career very much a result of historical conditions and changes.

While much variation exists in how scholars characterise, categorise and describe the field of media and communication research – which in itself of course is symptomatic of its multidisciplinary nature – McQuail (2004: 14–15), drawing on Rosengren (1983), identifies four key paradigms informing the field: (1) a functionalist paradigm which stresses the media’s contribution to the functioning and maintenance of the existing social order and favours quantitative research; (2) an interpretive paradigm favouring qualitative methods for describing and investigating cultural issues of meaning and content in relation to communication processes; (3) a radical-humanist paradigm, which, like the interpretive paradigm, favours qualitative methods but with a clear sense that the goal of research is to expose the ‘hegemonic’ role of the media and to effect radical change in society; and (4) the radical-structural paradigm, which:

looks at the media as a material, especially political-economic, force in society that has to be investigated in its concrete manifestations (i.e. with reference to patterns of ownership and control, market power, political connections) and by objective methods of analysis applied to reliable data. (McQuail, 2004: 15)

Another helpful taxonomy is offered by Oliver Boyd-Barrett (2002), who groups media and communication research under the main headings of effects research, cultural studies and political economy. Recognising the neat simplicity of this categorisation, Boyd-Barrett proceeds to expand each of these headings considerably in an overview that plots theoretical models of society, concepts of media power and types of communications process with prevailing focus (i.e. individual or social), tone (positive or negative) and characteristic method of enquiry, against a timeline that broadly indicates the predominance of each paradigm by decade(s) from the 1930s onwards. The historical purview is important, because it enables us to appreciate that different approaches and methods exist on a timeline: although they may be ever-present, they originate in particular historical circumstances and they wax and wane in response to social, political, historical and, of course, academic/scholarly pressures, factors and endeavours.

Perhaps the key influences on the development of the media and communication research field then can be identified and summarised as:

1.Technological – every new medium brings with it new communications possibilities, new formats and types of communication, new ways of relating to producers, audiences or consumers, new types of integration with other media technologies, and hence new research questions about their social and political roles in society.

2.Disciplinary – the nature of communications enquiry, including not only the questions asked but also the theories and methods used, has depended to a large extent on whether the informing disciplines – ­sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, ethnography etc. – were social sciences or humanities/humanistic sciences. We should, of course, also not forget the influence of science disciplines such as mathematics, computing and cybernetics, which were a significant influence in the early days of media and communication research and are increasingly becoming influential again in the digital communication environment (with keywords such as algorithmic analysis and big data analysis). Related to the question of disciplinary home, albeit not mapping on to disciplines in a simple straightforward manner, is the question of whether communications enquiry is executed with predominantly quantitative or predominantly qualitative methods, whether predominantly about ‘measurement’ or predominantly about ‘interpretation’.

3.Political – by which we wish to signal the classic division between administrative and critical communication research (a distinction first introduced in a now classic article by one of the founders of modern communication research, Paul Lazarsfeld (1941)): between research that is driven by commercial or administrative interests in functionality, efficiency and profit-maximisation, and research that is formulated from a socially and politically critical perspective with a view to informing critical social understanding and policy. ‘Critical’ in this context refers to research designed and conducted from a socially conscientious perspective in the interest of the ‘common good’ and not in the interest of furthering particular economic or political interests. The importance of political-historical context for understanding the development and focus of media and communication research has been noted by many, but is particularly succinctly expressed by British media scholar Graham Murdock (2012). He notes that while media and communication research was a key beneficiary of the tremendous growth in the 1930s to the 1960s in social scientific research, ‘it was also profoundly shaped by the political climate created by the onset of the Cold War’. This climate and ideological conflict dominated the intellectual landscape and provided a fertile ground for the dominant model of the social order during that period, ‘structural functionalism’, and its concerns with ‘maintaining social stability and cementing consensus’ – a task in which media and communications systems were seen as playing a key ‘gluing-together’ role (Murdock, 2012: 63).

On theory and methods – and asking the right questions

Appreciating the political context of the development of communications theory, research and methods links directly to the continuing debate in media and communication research about whether the right questions are being asked (Halloran, 1998). This is a debate that raises questions about method and focus (media-centric or socio-centric), but most significantly it points to the key argument that research should always be theory- and policy-driven, not method-driven:

[M]ethods are but a means to an end, important though they are, they are not an end in themselves, nor should they be used, as they have been, to determine the end or define the nature of the problems to be investigated. (Halloran, 1998: 10–11)

Halloran thus criticises communication research, particularly in its early history, for being unduly dominated by the ‘administrative’ (in Lazarsfeld’s terminology) needs of the media and the marketplace. This resulted, Halloran argues, in the favouring of a positivistic orientation leading to a concentration on methods which produce accurate and ‘scientific’ information on simple, narrow and, in sociological terms, relatively uninteresting phenomena. Essentially, his critique is that if much of the accumulated evidence from a long history of communication research appears both contradictory and inconclusive, then it is to a large extent because the wrong questions have been asked. That is, if communication research has failed to come up with clear answers, it is because much of it has been asking narrow and media-centric questions, using methods more concerned with what could be easily measured and counted than with whether that which was measured actually helped answer key questions about the wider social and political roles of media and communications processes.

Halloran’s critique was in large part directed at the body of mainly American communication research often referred to as ‘the dominant paradigm’ (Gitlin, 1978). However, it is perhaps evidence of the persistence of this paradigm that prominent media scholars continue to echo the call for research questions which consider media and communication processes in their social, political and historical context and which critically address the core classical sociological concerns about power, organisation and control in society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Philo and Miller thus rightly repeated the challenge to social scientists by asking ‘why much of social science and in particular media and cultural studies can now communicate little that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition
• List of tables and figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The research process
• 3 Researching ownership and media policy
• 4 Ethnography and observational methods
• 5 Content analysis
• 6 Critical Discourse Analysis
• 7 Analysing narratives and discourse schemas
• 8 Analysing photographs and video
• 9 Survey research
• 10 Focus group interviewing
• 11 Managing and analysing communication research data
• Glossary
• References
• Subject index
• Author/name index