The sociological imagination
A process sociologist use to develop questions about the connecting between individuals and their social context
- context (tied to broader context)
- individual problems are often tied to large things
Critical media studies
To think carefully and thoughtfully about research
- the context of the research
- Kearney: composed of interlocking and overlapping critical literacies over time
Qualitative research qualities
- collected through the research
- focused on meaning- making, social context
- exploratory and emergent
- non-numerical data
Three main qualitative tools
- material or textual analysis
- interviews
- participant observation
Emergence
Research remains open
- always adapting to new data findings and information
- qualitative researchers often view their subjects as dynamic
- highlights that there are interactions people have with that subject
Deductive research methods
- begin with a theory or hypothesis
- draw on existing literature and findings
- through data collected/analysis create broader theories / generalizations
- hypothesis is either confirmed or refuted
Inductive
- begin with a broader explorations about a topic and accumulating lots of data
- formulate research questions and design as info accumulates
- generate detailed context-specific findings and more questions
Qualitative research qualities
- involves little or no advance knowledge of dat to be collected
- allows participants to define how the study progresses and what data means
- strives for accuracy : dont assume viewpoints
- relies on subjective observations
- of then involves in-depth interviews
- literature reviews are often found at the end of a study
Grounded theory
- claims are grounded in evidence and accurate data
-data collection and analysis are happening simultaneously - flexibility : goes back to emergence
- inductive
Research inspiration
- serendipity
- hanging around
- personal experience
Unobtrusive methods
- ways of amassing data without interacting with research participants
- interpretive/ textual analysis
- semiotic analysis
- frame analysis
- discourse analysis
Content analysis
- used often in a general sense to design approaches that gather and evaluate text content
- used for counting and coding methods
Coding and codes
Codes are names for topics, events, people that appear in texts and notes
- used by researchers to group or categorize data
- construct patterns, find meaning, condense material
- describe what’s present, focus attention, identify meaningful or significant elements
Initial and focussed coding
Salience
Where the focus and meaning is emphasized
Random sampling
- each text or person has an equal chance of being selected
Non-random sampling
Targeted groups, categories or topics to pull samples from
Importance of frames
- dictates how something is portrayed which directly impacts audience
- entman: frames have for locations in communication : the communicator, the text, the receiver and the culture
Frames
“framing, as the process of frame building, refers to how issues are cast by those who control or influence the discourse. It entails selecting particular aspects of reality and making them more salient than others ‘to promote a particular problem definition”
