Toward Ethical Cyberspace Audience Research: Strategies for Using the Internet for Television Audience Studies

This article examines the possibilities for qualitative audience study afforded by the Internet, carefully detailing both the benefits and dangers o f such research. In answer to methodological issues resulting from online communication with subjects, the essay calls for the application o f various feminist and anthropological methodological practices, and considers methodological dilemmas related to perceived privacy, natural data and lurking, informed consent procedures, balancing anonymity, and data accessibility. In the course o f outlining methodological considerations especially salient when finding audiences through Internet spaces, we reflect on our own dilemmas in designing studies that meet the ethical standards of feminist methodology.     

Speaking into Silences: Autoethnography,Communication, and Applied Research

Editor's Note: Given the rare use of autoethnography in the field of communication, I invited Dr. Tillmann to discuss autoethnography as a valuable tool in applied communication research. This discussion serves as a prelude to her essay “Body and Bulimia Revisited: Reflections on ‘A Secret Life.’”

In 2004, two articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research (Ashcraft & Tretheway, 2004; Goodall, 2004) celebrated the merits of auto- and narrative ethnography, methods of research grounded in lived experience and evocative modes of representation that seek to engage readers emotionally, aesthetically, ethically, and politically. Despite these and other persuasive calls for auto- and narrative ethnographic works, few have been published in communication journals. More than four years ago, JACR offered readers arguments for this kind of scholarship, yet no full-length autoethnography appeared in its pages—until now. This essay, a prelude to its companion, “Body and Bulimia Revisited,” speaks into that silence.     

New Significance for an Old Method: CAS Theory and Ethnography

This paper presents a new significance for an old method by describing the theory-method fit between complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory and ethnography. Using an example from an ethnographic study of intergroup conflict in joint product development, this paper supports the argument that doing ethnography is necessary to find and analyze empirical evidence for what CAS theory illuminates about the social world. I extend this argument by discussing its importance for communication research. A key question for communication researchers is how system-level events in complex social systems are grounded in and produced by local interactions among individuals. This paper describes and illustrates some important insights that researchers can gain into this question by paying attention to the parallels between CAS theory and ethnography in the investigations of complex communicative phenomena.     

Interpretive Inquiry as Qualitative Communication Research

Qualitative communication research approaches vary from grounded theory and participant-observation to Q-sort, content analysis, and ethnographic inquiry—to name but a few. What often rests outside the qualitative rubric is the hermeneutic tradition of interpretive scholarship. This essay unites interpretive inquiry and qualitative research in summary fashion by outlining a macro understanding of qualitative communication inquiry, an interpretive approach to communication scholarship within a philosophical tradition entitled philosophical hermeneutics, and finally a public roadmap of how to understand and engage interpretive inquiry as a form of qualitative research in communication. This essay advocates interpretive inquiry as an additional contributor to the ongoing tradition of qualitative research in communication.     

Engaging “Others” in Civic Engagement through Ethnography of Communication

This essay explains how ethnography of communication informed a model of public participation designed to engage underserved populations in culturally sensitive deliberative discussions. Community college students successfully served as coresearchers to pilot test and assess the effectiveness of a community-service learning model of civic engagement research.     

Documenting Communities of Practice: Making the Case for Archival Ethnography*

This paper seeks to present a new direction for archival research: ethnographic fieldwork. The author argues that this set of qualitative methods presents new opportunities for researchers to study phenomena in archival settings. Using the author's research on competing definitions of value in the world of film preservation as a case study, this article gives readers unversed in ethnography and grounded theory a primer which may be used as a starting point for considering how to apply such qualitative methods to the design of new research agendas and to solve questions specific to the archival domain. This paper is a revised version of the methodological chapter of the author's dissertation:The Imperative to Preserve: Competing Definitions of Value in the World of Film Preservation, PhD dissertation (Los Angeles: UCLA, 2001).     

Qualitative Inquiry and the Future of Health Communication Research

This article examines the ways that qualitative inquiry, especially when used in concert with quantitative inquiry in multimethodological designs, can contribute to the research challenges of health care and health promotion. It explores methodological diversity in health communication research and illustrates how survey, textual analytic, and ethnographic research are utilized in health communication research. The article concludes with a discussion of how multimethodological research designs have been successfully employed to examine complex health communication models, theories, and processes.     

Recordkeeping in the Production of Scientific Knowledge: An Ethnographic Study

Recent scholarship in archival studies has employed “non-traditional” modes of analysis to theorize the nature of the record and recordkeeping in organizational contexts. In that tradition, this paper discusses the author's use of ethnographic methodology to study recordkeeping in one academic research laboratory. The paper explores how ethnography contributes to our understanding of the laboratory as a recordkeeping organization and the intersections of scientific practice and the kinds of records scientists create and use. The paper calls for more analysis of recordkeeping as an information infrastructure and inquiry into the nature of the record in other kinds of knowledge production environments.     

Communication research on a broader age: An introduction to the special forum on funded research in communication

This essay introduces the special forum on funded research in communication. It briefly discusses the relationship of funded research with theoretical and methodological development in the communication discipline and the impact of receiving grant support on the professional life of an academic and on collegiality, resources, and university recognition for a department of communication. It also addresses the potential impact of funded research for strengthening the role and visibility of the communication discipline in the social sciences, and for increasing the impact of communication scholarship on policy.     

Communication research on a broader age: An introduction to the special forum on funded research in communication

This essay introduces the special forum on funded research in communication. It briefly discusses the relationship of funded research with theoretical and methodological development in the communication discipline and the impact of receiving grant support on the professional life of an academic and on collegiality, resources, and university recognition for a department of communication. It also addresses the potential impact of funded research for strengthening the role and visibility of the communication discipline in the social sciences, and for increasing the impact of communication scholarship on policy.     

Methods for studying family visitors in art museums: A cross-disciplinary review of current research

This paper examines current trends in family studies research, details the methodological and topical perspectives that are emerging, and reflects on how these findings could be integrated to provide a more coherent approach to researching the leisure, learning and recreational aspects of family visitors to art museums. Research findings from disciplines such as sociology, ethnography, education, design and marketing are of interest to the field of visitor studies, and this paper contributes to the wider research agenda by providing an overview of family research methods from a range of other disciplines, as well as those used within visitor studies.Over the last decade, there has been a growth of research in family learning in science museums, leading to an emerging disciplinary matrix, whilst many aspects of family visits to art museums remain relatively unexplored. The paper discusses the problems of gathering meaningful data from adults and children in family groups, and concludes by suggesting that a challenge for art museums is to learn from what is happening in other areas of cultural research into families, and to develop a framework for research which builds on the methodological strengths and practical experience of robust studies.     

The Undressed Newsroom

Rapidly changing working conditions in recent years, along with the need to reduce the costs of news production, require journalists to adapt. Our suggestion here is that many of the research methods for analysing journalists' work environments to date are no longer sufficient for capturing this ongoing change. In searching for new approaches to analysis of the journalistic environment, we decided to apply visual ethnography, a method not yet used in the Czech Republic and not much used in the world beyond. For our pilot study of Czech newsrooms, we worked with both photographs taken of the journalists involved in our project and photographs taken by our research team (photographs showed both journalists' working conditions and working processes). We then interviewed the journalists about the photographs and more widely about their working practices and conditions. This paper presents the results of the research but also considers the advantages and challenges of the visual ethnographic approach and its implementation in media environments.     

Accessing the Audience Community: How Newspapers Connect with Audience Communities in Finland,Japan, and Korea

The article contributes to the research on media management by approaching the audience as consisting of communities, instead of considering it a mass audience. By developing audience community as a concept in media management and audience research and investigating mainstream newspapers’ perceptions and practices of audience community relations, the study aims to provide a future outlook for the changing community nature of audiences. Newspaper organizations are starting to perceive the audience as a more concrete network of people, and journalistic processes can increasingly consist of generating platforms and practices for communication and communal activities with and among the audience. In the article, these processes are studied empirically by means of a qualitative study carried out in Finnish, Japanese, and Korean newspapers. Interestingly, the findings indicate that audience communities do not, after all, play an important role in the daily practices of the newspapers. The engagement with audience communities in social media is only occasional, intermittent, and by no means systematic. By contrast, interaction with offline communities seems to be more familiar and considered more valuable than connecting with audience communities in social media.     

Bordering Populism in Immigration Activism: Outlaw–Civic Discourse in a (Counter)Public

This study involved a rhetorical ethnography and textual analyses of an anti-immigration group over a six month period. I argue the collective engaged in a deleterious form of bordering populism, in which communicators continually attack and praise the same targets. This populism was generated by outlaw–civic shifts between marginalized, outsider stances, and more official, general cultural logics. The group demonstrated a fragile, fracturing approach to a public issue, and local, vernacular practices that are employed to bridge pressures for agitative and integrative movement communication in a pluralistic, globalizing environment. Overall, each of the group's stark rhetorical shifts for and against the government, businesses, and immigrants concurrently crafted and dismantled rhetorical borders, creating an unstable (counter)public forgoing the possibility of democratic communication and community.     

Putting the U in carbon capture and storage: rhetorical boundary negotiation within the CCS/CCUS scientific community

This paper examines responses to a framing shift from carbon capture and storage (CCS) to carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) within science and engineering professionals’ communication. We argue that the framing shift is a breach in the rhetorical boundaries of the CCS professional community that calls forth negotiation through responses that proactively support, resist, or acquiesce. This study offers a heuristic for examining scientific framing in expert-to-expert internal scientific rhetoric. It also contributes to contemporary research on the intersection of rhetoric of science and science, technology, and society; the social dimensions of CCS; energy communication; and applied communicative practices in scientific communities.     

Technocratic and design stances toward communication expertise: how GDSS facilitators understand their work

This study investigates the shared, and often unstated, premises that frame the expert communication servicing of meeting facilitators who implement group decision support systems (GDSS). Nine premises about facilitating communication were reconstructed from the way practitioners use the concept "process" to describe the expert servicing they perform. The premises reveal how the facilitators treat an analytic distinction between process and content to be a natural fact about communication. This factual presumption entails a nascent philosophy of practice--"process management"--that facilitators use to persuade clients, and practitioners, about the trustworthiness and credibility of their servicing. The ironic consequence of this philosophy is the denial of the very influence and expert judgment they exercise in their professional action. This is not only problematic for individual practitioners and consumers of facilitation services but for the development of facilitation practice itself. The implications of this analysis for facilitation practice and applied communication research are discussed in terms of a "design stance" toward communication expertise which is an alternative to the "technocratic stance" that currently frames practitioner, consumer, and research interests in GDSS facilitators.     

Technocratic and design stances toward communication expertise: how GDSS facilitators understand their work

This study investigates the shared, and often unstated, premises that frame the expert communication servicing of meeting facilitators who implement group decision support systems (GDSS). Nine premises about facilitating communication were reconstructed from the way practitioners use the concept "process" to describe the expert servicing they perform. The premises reveal how the facilitators treat an analytic distinction between process and content to be a natural fact about communication. This factual presumption entails a nascent philosophy of practice--"process management"--that facilitators use to persuade clients, and practitioners, about the trustworthiness and credibility of their servicing. The ironic consequence of this philosophy is the denial of the very influence and expert judgment they exercise in their professional action. This is not only problematic for individual practitioners and consumers of facilitation services but for the development of facilitation practice itself. The implications of this analysis for facilitation practice and applied communication research are discussed in terms of a "design stance" toward communication expertise which is an alternative to the "technocratic stance" that currently frames practitioner, consumer, and research interests in GDSS facilitators.     

“Putting Patients First”: Systematically Distorted Communication and Merck's Marketing of Vioxx

An estimated 27,000-60,000 patients died while taking Merck's drug Vioxx between 2000 and 2004. This essay uses Deetz's treatment of systematically distorted communication and Nilsen's significant choice to analyze Merck's communication about the drug. The company claimed publicly to be forthright about Vioxx's safety. The article shows, however, that Merck systematically distorted communication through neutralization, topical avoidance, and disqualification in ways that thwarted physicians' and patients' abilities to make an informed choice about Vioxx. The analysis shows that Merck employees' consent to economic priorities framed these communication practices as legitimate and rational within the organization. The same practices, however, appeared socially irresponsible to members of the scientific community outside the company. In contrast to Merck's practices, the essay offers more participatory communication applications that uphold companies' moral obligation to their stakeholders.     

Queering communication studies: a Journal of Applied Communication Research forum

ABSTRACT

Genders and sexualities continue to remain underexplored in the field of communication studies and the academy in general. This essay examines possibilities for incorporating queer perspectives into communication studies. At the invitation of the Journal of Applied Communication Research editor, 9 communication scholars who use queer theory or queer perspectives in their own work responded to a series of questions addressing how queer theory and perspectives can be used in the discipline, both by those who are new to queer theorizing and those who are looking to expand their knowledge and practices. The answers to these questions provide an understanding of what queer theory is and its relationship with LGBT studies; allow practical considerations for incorporating queer perspectives into communication scholarship in multiple methodological areas; offer considerations for welcoming queer voices in the classroom, the communication discipline, and the larger academy; and indicate several scholarly resources for those who want to learn more about queer theory and LGBT studies.     

The Ethnographer of Communication at the Table: Building Cultural Competence,Designing Strategic Action

Ethnographers of communication are increasingly working within interdisciplinary teams to address social problems in communities, corporations, and governments. This special forum brings together ethnographers of communication to reflect on the opportunities, tensions, and challenges involved in using the ethnography of communication to seek workable solutions to social problems with fellow scholars, practitioners, and community members. Through empirical case studies, contributors demonstrate how the ethnography of communication is used to build cultural competence and design strategic action.