The feature of our first issue of the year showcases three upcoming events sponsored by our divisions and organized by members. These events present outstanding opportunities for researchers to engage with current political communication scholarship. The organizers of our two polcomm preconferences at this year’s ICA present reasons for why and how the themes of their preconferences are relevant to political communication research. They also preview their conference programs.
Beyond the ICA preconferences, we provide information about an exciting opportunity for young researchers in political communication to engage with some of the most eminent scholars in our field: the Summer School in Political Communication, also co-sponsored by our division. The contributions highlight some of the great work by our division members to create communication spaces for scholars to engage with some of the most pressing questions in our field today. We hope they will pique your interest and make you consider attending one or more of these events yourself!
1. David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Matthew Powers, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, organizers of an ICA preconference onQualitative Political Communication Research, discuss the background, timeliness, and relevance of qualitative approaches in political communication.
2. Christian Baden, Wouter van Atteveldt, and Jana Diesner, organizers of an ICA preconference on Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research, discuss how these two advanced techniques apply to and promise great advances in political communication scholarship.
3. Gianpietro Mazzoleni introduces one of the most important initiatives for junior scholars in political communication, the International Summer School in Political Communication and Electoral Behaviour. The theme of the School this year is “(New) Media Effects on Electoral Behaviour,” and young researchers intrerested in taking part are very much encouraged to submit their research proposals — the deadline for submissions has been extended to April 19, 2014!
What is the Role of Qualitative Research in Political Communication?
ICA Preconference on Qualitative Political Communication Research (Seattle, WA, May 22, 2014)
David Karpf, George Washington University
Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Powers, University of Washington
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford and Roskilde University
Political communication research has a rich, methodologically and theoretically diverse history. Consider Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Scholars today may remember Lazarsfeld primarily for his pioneering contributions to survey research. However, a close reading of his work reveals that Lazarsfeld not only recognized the value of qualitative research. True to his roots in sociology, he practiced it, and actively argued for it. Indeed, Lazarsfeld’s ground-breaking idea of personal influence in political communication emerged through the in-depth interviews and field observations that he and his associates conducted in Eerie County, Ohio (1940, published as “The People’s Choice”), Decatur, Illinois (1945, published as “Personal Influence”), and Elmira, New York (1948, published as “Voting”).
Our main journal, Political Communication, and our most important professional forum, the APSA and ICA Political Communication Division (PCD), are in principle committed to continuing and furthering this mixed methods tradition. But in practice the field has taken a quantitative turn since the 1970s. Methods and theories associated with behavioralist currents within political science and social psychology have come to define the center of the field and what is considered legitimate research. As quantitative methods came to dominate the center of the field, qualitative research has become more marginal, especially in the United States.
For example, in an analysis of the Political Communication journal over the past ten years (forthcoming in the 2013 ICA Theme Book), we found that only 20% of published articles involve some sort of qualitative research (defined broadly to encompass interpretative, field, historical, critical, and rhetorical analyses.) Even more striking, only 9.6% of articles are based on what we consider empirical field research – interviews and field observations of the kind Lazarsfeld and his colleagues engaged in.
While some individual pieces of qualitative scholarship are very influential, much of the field seems to be moving in a different direction, even as qualitative methods remain central to adjacent fields with overlapping objects of analysis, such as sociology, journalism studies, and audience research. Even more striking, qualitative methods – such as focus groups, in-depth interviewing, and qualitative panel studies – are central to the work of political practitioners. Indeed, the 2012 Obama campaign’s Director of Opinion Research David Simas made the point (personal communication) that not only did the campaign conduct more quantitative research than any campaign in history; it also conducted more qualitative research than any campaign in history.
What might qualitative research contribute to the field in the future? We hope to find out at the ICA pre-conference on qualitative research in political communication in May, co-sponsored by the PCD. In organizing this preconference, we were inspired by the challenge posed in W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar’s 2008 critique of the state of the field and their call for researchers to improve their understanding of political communication processes in rapidly changing social and technological contexts. We believe that part of the stasis in the field that Bennett and Iyengar identify relates to the overly narrow reliance on quantitative methodological approaches such as surveys and experiments. We believe that scholars need to supplement these methods with approaches that bring us closer to the actual social and technological contexts of political life and help us understand how political communication processes are experienced by citizens, practitioners, candidates, and journalists. Therefore, the preconference focuses on how qualitative research, especially field methods, can advance theory-building and provide sophisticated analytical and empirical understandings of the changing contexts of political communication, from the shifting forms of journalism and campaigns to the new platforms and contexts where citizens gather and engage in political life.
The pre-conference features 33 original research papers and methodological articles from 11 countries, and is organized by David Karpf (George Washington University), Daniel Kreiss (UNC-Chapel Hill), Matthew Powers(University of Washington), and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (University of Oxford and Roskilde University). The works presented discuss the role of qualitative methods in political communication research, their relation to other methods and theories, and present studies that rely on qualitative methods. The pre-conference will also feature a number of prominent scholars, including Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (USC), W. Lance Bennett (University of Washington), Leah Lievrouw (UCLA), Silvio Waisbord (GWU), Michael X. Delli Carpini (University of Pennsylvania), and Michael Schudson (Columbia University), who will discuss the role of qualitative research in theories and research on political communication.
As conference organizers, we have also set up a blog publishing previews of the papers accepted for presentation at the pre-conference, interviews with authors of books and articles relevant to the discussion, and short essays on methodological issues, research observations, and classics re-read for their relevance today. (Scholars interested in contributing to the blog should contact one of the organizers.)
We hope the pre-conference will help advance our understanding of the role of qualitative research in political communication research and help foster a community of scholars keen to develop the analytical and theoretical potential of empirical methods that, pursued alone and in combination with quantitative methods, helped our field during an earlier period of upheaval in media and politics—and may do so again.
Conference website: http://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/ica-pre-conference/
Reconnecting Theory and Methodology in the “Network Tradition”
ICA Preconference on Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research (Seattle, WA, May 22, 2014)
Christian Baden, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich
Wouter van Atteveldt, Free University Amsterdam
Jana Diesner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
At last year’s ICA Conference in London, a packed plenary testified to the timeliness of what Elihu Katz, Ronald E. Rice, Richard Rogers and Noshir Contractor described as the “network tradition” in communication research. Not only do numerous theories in communications imply networked behavior and influences, but also many other theories can or must be reconceptualized in a networked manner. Opinion leaders and information diffusion, opinion climates and campaign communication, news construction and framing can be understood as networked practices and patterns in political communication. Also the rise of social media, which are networked in their very structure, has given further momentum to a network perspective in communication research.
Nevertheless, the impressive and fast advances in network analytic methodology often remain somewhat disconnected from the aforementioned theoretical questions and concerns. Applications of network methodology remain too often driven by data and powerful algorithms; at the same time, theory-driven research often makes only limited use of the rich methodological toolbox of network analysis. Important potentials of communication theory for directing the development of network methodology, and of network perspectives for informing current research, remain to be actualized: Given the flattening of hierarchies and the collaborative definition of fluid interaction patterns in communication (e.g., in social media, governance networks, social movements), network views can complement old sender-focused and gatekeeper-dominated research perspectives; they can add differentiation to person-centered or aggregative research into audience behavior or interpersonal communication, and redefine the view upon social context and patterns of social interaction. Also in research into media contents, networked perspectives enable a nuanced view upon linked or competing claims, frames, and other contents; advances in semantic network analysis, specifically, can inform the study of evolving discourse and dynamic debates, and even reflect the participatory, interactive structure of content production and negotiation in public communication.
This preconference contributes to reconnecting theory and methodology in the “network tradition” in communication research: Its papers advance and apply cutting edge network analytic strategies to advance research on established research questions of theoretical concern to the field, and they rephrase important theoretical questions to make full use of the powerful potentials of network methodology. The preconference features a rich mix of papers ranging from the networked theoretical modeling of social influence to the development of new, network-based measures for gauging frame evolution. The program furthermore comprises presentations of current tools developed to render network analysis in communication more user-friendly and flexible in application.
The program comprises four sessions, organized into two main blocks. The two morning sessions, which deal with “Networks and Persuasion” and “Networked communication dynamics”, focus on the nexus of content and interaction in the analysis of socio-semantic networks. In the first session, Leo Kim considers participatory practices in stem cell research; Robert Bond et al. present a massive experiment into social influence on social media, and Nick Beauchamp unfolds a model of argumentative persuasion in networked online communication. In the second session, James Danowski predicts mobile communication network evolution from semantic network data, and Se Jung Park et al. investigate interaction and content multiplication patterns on twitter. In addition, Jana Diesner as well as Kasper Welbers and Wouter van Atteveldt present novel software tools for the analysis of semantic and socio-semantic networks.
In the afternoon, two sessions on “Interactive News Networks” and “Measuring Network Evolution” primarily address the constructive and diachronic processes that characterize semantic news networks. The third session comprises one study by Jelle Boumans et al. on the production of news from the interaction of sources, journalists; an analysis of frame alignment between PR material, media contents, and public beliefs by Toni van der Meer et al.; and an assessment of country-specific variations in news framing of the financial crisis by Jan Kleinnijenhuis et al. In the last session, Christian Baden and Giovanni Motta present a comparative extension to their Evolutionary Factor Analysis framework that serves to compare dynamic discourse processes; Jakob-Moritz Eberl et al. discuss the measurement and role of higher or lower complexity presentations in the news, and George Barnett uses international terrorism coverage to demonstrate the power of a novel strategy for gauging coherence and co-movement between news debates. The program concludes with a roundtable discussion on the state and future directions of network methodology and theory in communication research.
Taken together, the contributions to the preconference raise theoretical, operational, measurement and analytic questions, and offer ample room for discussion. The contributors comprise researchers experienced in different aspects of networked communication research, bringing in perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and information technology. The diversity of international participants, and the mix of young and experienced scholars promises an innovative and rich debate.
Conference website: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner/calls/ICA2014_socsem_preconf.html