Marcus' Questions

Q1) While I was reading the Bohnsack and Schmidt piece, my mind kept drifting to advertising focus groups – a bit of a stretch from journalism research, I know, but that’s the most common use of a group interview that kept popping into my head. There, the concept of a “socially desirable outcome” is a bit of a moot point, since they’re dealing with market appeal rather than social values (or at least, in so far as those two can be separated). They also care far less about issues like spirals of silence, since they’re looking for a group reaction to a public product, not plumbing the depths of human psyche. Which made me wonder – how much does the intent of a focus group, the overall research goal, affect the participants? The authors touched on that, but is there a substantive difference between responses for an economic product than to questions on a social phenomenon? And is that part of the problem with focus group research, that our society tends to compartmentalize public and private spheres and ideas?

Q2) I also think the debate on small vs. large newspapers is open to criticism. There is a fairly substantial bias in academia and the professional community that small papers are short on news, and big on culture; that the Rotary Club is more important than the city council. I’ll admit I’ve fallen into that trap before myself, having spent over a year covering rural rotary clubs. But I would argue that the words themselves mean different things to different editors – that “community” in a town of 15,000 means something completely different than in a city of 150,000. Since qualitative research relies heavily on terminology, are there ways to compensate for dual meanings like that? I can think of several quantitative ways to establish local and metropolitan community, and much of my research thus far at UT has been devoted to similar ideas. But are there qualitative ways of establishing those differences, beyond the author simply stating his or her observations?

Q3) On a similar note that will sound, at first, like it’s completely out of left field – have there ever been studies of the studies that focus qualitatively on small communities? I understand the party line regarding small town journalism, but I also understand that the kinds of people conducting those studies – primarily well-educated academics living in established urban, typically liberal settings – often have little in common with folks living in small towns, who have well established histories of rural life, conservative ideologies and inaccessibility to higher education. If there’s a serious connection between the author and the study in qualitative research, as we’ve discussed, then is there a possibility that most research on small publications is flawed? If the authors themselves have little in common with their subjects, and if qualitative research is open to that critique, then isn’t that a big deal?

Edward Said’s theory of orientalism was designed for international application – the East is what the West is not. But I wonder if the same could be applied here on an urban/rural level?

Q4) This, too, may sound out of left field, but how much qualitative research is devoted to the study of qualitative research? Is it that we’re focusing on that material because this is a methods class, or is it independently common? I’m asking because I don’t have much exposure to qualitative studies, so the context might be helpful.

Q5) Regarding the Dueze piece, how much did language influence those results? I understand selecting the Netherlands to avoid the tabloids in the US and UK, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that – it’s not that American and British publications and sensationalist, but rather, that English language publications are more sensationalist. It also seems fairly difficult to establish a control for that group, since just about every English speaking nation has media that could fall into that category; so how important would establishing controls like that be?