A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research Edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W.Jankowski London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Selection and editorial matter: Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W.Jankowski. Individual chapters: the respective authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research 1. Mass media. Research. Methods I. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn II. Jankowski, Nicholas W. 302.23011 Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A Handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research/edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W.Jankowski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mass media—Research—Methodology. 2. Humanities— Methodology. 3. Social sciences—Methodology. I. Jensen, Klaus. II. Jankowski, Nick. P91.3.H35 1991 302.23 ′ 072–dc20 91–3686 ISBN 0-203-40980-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-71804-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05405-2 (Print Edition) Contents List of tables vii List of contributors ix Preface xiii Introduction: the qualitative turn 1 Klaus Bruhn Jensen Part I History 13 1 Humanistic scholarship as qualitative science: contributions to mass communication research 17 Klaus Bruhn Jensen 2 The qualitative tradition in social science inquiry: contributions to mass communication research 44 Nicholas W.Jankowski and Fred Wester Part II Systematics 75 MEDIA INSTITUTIONS 3 Qualitative methods in the study of news 79 Gaye Tuchman 4 The creation of television drama 93 Horace M.Newcomb MEDIA CONTENTS 5 The interdisciplinary study of news as discourse 108 Teun A.van Dijk vi Contents 6 Textual analysis of fictional media content 121 Peter Larsen MEDIA AUDIENCES 7 Reception analysis: mass communication as the social production of meaning 135 Klaus Bruhn Jensen 8 Communication and context: ethnographic perspectives on the media audience 149 David Morley and Roger Silverstone MEDIA CONTEXTS 9 Qualitative research and community media 163 Nicholas W.Jankowski 10 Historical approaches to communication studies 175 Michael Schudson Part III Pragmatics 191 THEORY DEVELOPMENT 11 Studying events in their natural settings 193 Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang SOCIAL CONTEXTS AND USES OF RESEARCH 12 Media, education, and communities 216 Michael Green References 232 Index of names 260 Index of subjects 268 Tables 1.1 The roles of language in qualitative methodologies 32 2.1 Data collection and information types: methods of obtaining information 60 7.1 The journalists’ news stories 142 7.2 The viewers’ news stories: two examples 144 7.3 The super themes of news reception 144 Contributors Teun A.van Dijk is Professor of Discourse Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. After early work in poetics, text linguistics, and the psychology of text processing, his recent work focuses on the social psychology of discourse, especially news discourse and the reproduction of racism through discourse. He is the author of several volumes in each of these domains, and is current editor of TEXT and founding editor of the new journal Discourse and Society. Michael Green is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies (formerly Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), University of Birmingham, UK. He has written extensively on media, cultural policy, and education (for example, Unpopular Education from CCCS); he also works actively with media teachers at different educational levels and with an arts and media center. Nicholas W.Jankowski is Associate Professor at the Institute of Mass Communication, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Author of Community Television in Amsterdam, he has been conducting qualitative research of small-scale media since 1975. He is also involved in the study of cable television services and is research director of the Centre for Telematics Research in Amsterdam. Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, TV, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Making Sense of the News and of many articles on reception analysis, qualitative methodology, and news. During 1988–9 he was a Fellow of the American Council of x Contributors Learned Societies affiliated with the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, USA. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang are sociologists on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, where both of them are Professors. Previous joint publications include Collective Dynamics (1961), The Battle for Public Opinion (1983), and most recently Etched in Memory: the Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation (1990). The American Association for Public Opinion Research honored them with its award for a lifetime of exceptionally distinguished achievement in the field. Peter Larsen is Professor in the Department of Mass Communication, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the editor of the recent UNESCO study, Import/Export: International Flow of Television Fiction, and has written extensively on mass communication research and semiotics. David Morley is Lecturer in Communications at Goldsmith’s College, London University, UK. He is the author of The Nationwide Audience and Family Television and of numerous articles on qualitative audience research, cultural theory, and other aspects of mass communication research. Horace M.Newcomb is Professor of Communication in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas in Austin, USA. He is the author of TV: the Most Popular Art, editor of Television: the Critical View (now in its fourth edition), co- author, with Robert S.Alley, of The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with America’s Leading Television Producers, and has written extensively on television and other aspects of mass communication. Michael Schudson is Professor in the Departments of Communication and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of Discovering the News: a Social History of American Newspapers and other works, including as co- editor, with Chandra Mukerji, of the forthcoming Rethinking Popular Culture. Contributors xi Roger Silverstone is Director of the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture, and Technology, and Reader in Sociology, both positions at Brunel University, London, UK. He is the author of The Message of Television and other works on various aspects of mass media, and is currently preparing a new volume, Television and Everyday Life. Gaye Tuchman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA. She is the author of Making News: a Study in the Construction of Reality and many articles about news. Her most recent book is Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. Fred Wester is Associate Professor of Research Methodology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is the author of several books and articles on interpretive sociology and qualitative research methods. A recent work of which he is co-author, Qualitative Analysis in Practice, examines uses of the computer in qualitative research. Preface The publication of this Handbook marks the culmination of several professional and personal itineraries. The chapters of the volume suggest that the field of mass communication research has been undergoing two interrelated developments in recent decades: the rise of qualitative approaches as methodologies with an explanatory value in their own right, and the convergence of humanistic and social- scientific disciplines around this “qualitative turn.” As editors, we offer the Handbook as a resource for the further development and social use of qualitative methodologies in different cultural and institutional contexts. The personal itineraries have taken one editor from Europe to the United States, the other from the United States to Europe, and both to India, where the idea for the Handbook was first conceived during the 1986 meeting of the International Association for Mass Communication Research. As participants in this conference, we were reminded repeatedly that while qualitative research represented an important (and frequently the most inspiring) part of the scholarship presented at that and similar events, there were as yet hardly any journals, conference sessions, or handbooks available which could serve to institutionalize this area of inquiry and to introduce students and young researchers to its methodologies. The cultural setting of the 1986 conference also contributed to our awareness that for the study of communication in its varied social and cultural contexts to become valid or meaningful, methods of qualitative and “thick” description (Geertz, 1973) are required. We had carried with us to India the education and professional training of two distinctive traditions, Klaus Bruhn Jensen representing the humanities and Nick Jankowski the social sciences.