This chapter is about methods for managing and analyzing qualitative data. By qualitative data the authors mean text: newspapers, movies, sitcoms, e-mail traffic, folktales, life histories. They also mean narratives--narratives about getting divorced, about being sick, about surviving hand-to-hand combat, about selling sex, about trying to quit smoking. In fact, most of the archaeologically recoverable information about human thought and human behavior is text, the good stuff of social science.

Data Management and Analysis Methods

The measurement of meaning

Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

As a method specifically intended for the study of messages, content analysis is fundamental to mass communication research. Intercoder reliability, more specifically termed intercoder agreement, is a measure of the extent to which independent judges make the same coding decisions in evaluating the characteristics of messages, and is at the heart of this method. Yet there are few standard and accessible guidelines available regarding the appropriate procedures to use to assess and report intercoder reliability, or software tools to calculate it. As a result, it seems likely that there is little consistency in how this critical element of content analysis is assessed and reported in published mass communication studies. Following a review of relevant concepts, indices, and tools, a content analysis of 200 studies utilizing content analysis published in the communication literature between 1994 and 1998 is used to characterize practices in the field. The results demonstrate that mass communication researchers often fail to assess (or at least report) intercoder reliability and often rely on percent agreement, an overly liberal index. Based on the review and these results, concrete guidelines are offered regarding procedures for assessment and reporting of this important aspect of content analysis.

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Content Analysis in Mass Communication: Assessment and Reporting of Intercoder Reliability

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

This essay reconstructs communication theory as a dialogical-dialectical field according to two principles: the constitutive model of communication as a metamode1 and theory as metadiscursive practice. The essay argues that all communication theories are mutually relevant when addressed to a practical lifeworld in which “communication” is already a richly meaningful term. Each tradition of communication theory derives from and appeals rhetorically to certain commonplace beliefs about communication while challenging other beliefs. The complementarities and tensions among traditions generate a theoretical metadiscourse that intersects with and potentially informs the ongoing practical metadiscourse in society. In a tentative scheme of the field, rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical traditions of communication theory are distinguished by characteristic ways of defining communication and problems of communication, metadiscursive vocabularies, and metadiscursive commonplaces that they appeal to and challenge. Topoi for argumentation across traditions are suggested and implications for theoretical work and disciplinary practice in the field are considered. Communication theory is enormously rich in the range of ideas that fall within its nominal scope, and new theoretical work on communication has recently been flourishing.’ Nevertheless, despite the ancient roots and growing profusion of theories about communication, I argue that communication theory as an identifiable field of study does not yet exist.2 Rather than addressing a field of theory, we appear to be operating primarily in separate domains. Books and articles on communication theory seldom mention other works on communication theory except within narrow (inter)disciplinary specialties and schools of thought.’ Except within these little groups, communication theorists apparently neither agree nor disagree about much of anything. There is no canon of general theory to which they all refer. There are no common goals that

https://people.unica.it/ernestinagiudici/files/2014/03/CRAIG-COMMUNICATION-THEORY-AS-A-FIELD-1.pdf

Communication Theory as a Field

A research program on intellectual discussion in academic institutions is presented as a case that illustrates a method for constructing grounded practical communication theory. Within a practical discipline perspective, theory is conceived as a rational reconstruction of practices for the purpose of informing further practice and reflection. The theoretical reconstruction of communication practices can be undertaken at three interrelated levels of analysis, here called the technical, problem, and philosophical levels. Based on interpretive discourse analysis of recorded departmental colloquia and interviews with participants, we identify a complex interactional dilemma that arises within this type of communicative situation (problem level), specific techniques by which participants attempt to cope with that dilemma (technical level), and two situated ideals to which they have recourse for reflecting on the normative basis of their own and others' actions (philosophical level). Because of the ways grounded practical theory differs from other theoretical approaches, we argue that existing criteria for evaluating theories must be rethought within this radically reflexive enterprise.

Grounded Practical Theory: The Case of Intellectual Discussion

A corpus of transcribed, oral requests used in a previous study of compliance-gaining strategies (Tracy, Craig, Smith, & Spisak, 1984) is examined interpretively from the perspective of the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978). Findings include the following: (1) politeness strategies occur in great abundance and variety; (2) superstrategies are mixed in varyingly skillful ways; (3) goals are accomplished through multifunctional discourse; (4) the interpretation of politeness strategies confronts several kinds of indeterminacy; (5) facework strategies that fall outside the scope of the politeness theory, including aggravation and speaker-oriented strategies, are much in evidence. In response to the several theoretical problems that emerge in the course of the analysis, six tenets on which to build a new theory of facework are proposed.

The discourse of requests: Assessment of a politeness approach.

Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions

Fourteen contributors present different approaches to conversational analysis. Their analyses of the B-K conversation, which appears as an appendix, will present a challenge to the reader who enjoys weighing the relative merits of each, and who seeks creative solutions to the problems of face-to-face interactions. The book also serves a useful function in getting an extensively transcribed and analyzed conversation into the public domain. '...an excellent resource for scholars interested in the growing area of conversation and coherence as a part of the total study of human communication.' -- Journal of Communication, Winter 1985

Robert T. Craig

Papers

Communication Theory as a Field

Grounded Practical Theory: The Case of Intellectual Discussion

The discourse of requests: Assessment of a politeness approach.

Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions

Conversational coherence : form, structure, and strategy