Grounded Theory Review: An International Journal, 2006
Adherents to classic grounded theory have gotten used to spotting the pretenders working under th... more Adherents to classic grounded theory have gotten used to spotting the pretenders working under the grounded theory banner. Some of these faux-GT researchers have worked in a fog, misunderstanding fundamentals of the method; these are the studies that leave us shaking our heads and wondering about the doctoral committee and peer reviewers who did not bother to find out more about the method they were evaluating. More infuriating are the authors who are claiming to improve on grounded theory, to reground it, to quote one notable British author who, lack of handson grounded theory experience aside, manages a booklength critique of the method. Two recent books in the"remaking grounded theory" genre are from sociologists with some years of grounded theory projects behind them. Adele E. Clarke, author of Situational Analysis, was a student and colleague of Anselm L. Strauss at the University of California San Francisco. Kathy Charmaz, author of Constructing Grounded Theory, is among the few grounded theorists who studied with Barney G. Glaser and Strauss at UCSF.
This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of ... more This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of purposive attending proposes a feedback loop in which awareness increases relevance, which can increase attending, which can then reset awareness. This article focuses on two aspects of the broader theory: the ambivalence surrounding everyday news-attending and the role cultural identities such as gender and race might play in heightening that ambivalence. The work, influenced by Carey's call to treat news-attending in a ritual context, demonstrates how news-as-ritual and news-as-information-acquisition exist in daily tension. The work was developed using classic grounded theory methodology, which outlines protocols for building theory from data, which included interviews, participant observation with a book discussion group, and qualitative document analysis of news discussions in selected internet communities, letters to the editor, news articles, and industry reports.
Grounded Theory Review: An International Journal, 2015
The awareness context has been a source of inspiration for grounded theories for more than 50 yea... more The awareness context has been a source of inspiration for grounded theories for more than 50 years; yet little has been done to extend the theory beyond nursing and the medical field, and a few works on identity. This paper extends the awareness context by examining its role in several high-profile disasters, natural and man-made, where gaining a clear sense of what was going on was often blocked by poor information flow and general communication failures, interpersonal and technological. Selective coding and the introduction of new concepts after analyzing hundreds of pages of documents issued by special commissions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, and the Sago Mine Disaster not only explain various processes around awareness in the midst of crisis, but also illuminate pre-crisis patterns that, if attended, could have mitigated the impact of the disasters.
NRJ BooksQualitative Research in Journalism: Taking it to the Streets, edited by Sharon Hartin Io... more NRJ BooksQualitative Research in Journalism: Taking it to the Streets, edited by Sharon Hartin Iorio (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004) 235 pages, $27.50 (paperback).Journalists who conduct in-depth interviews or spend months observing people going about everyday routines are in many ways doing what academic qualitative researchers do. The contributors to this book use that common ground to present qualitative research methodology as a way to better ferret out the intricacies of everyday life that often go unreported.Sharon Hartin Iorio, editor of the collection, writes that there is a greater need for journalists to "link individuals' personal interests and common concerns and the larger issues that touch people's daily lives." For this, she argues, there is a greater need for training than ever. Iorio writes that in the same way that Philip Meyer's work in "precision journalism" increased journalists' comfort with statistics and quantitative methods, journalists are now taking up "qualitative method journalism," from case studies to ethnography, to document more of the concerns of everyday people. Qualitative methodology is promoted as a way to navigate what one chapter author, Clifford G. Christians, describes as a shift in the news paradigm from "objective to interpretive sufficiency."Much goes well in this book. Part I of the book consists of three chapters that provide historical context for qualitative research and current trends in journalism. Part II provides chapters focused on specific methods: case studies, focus groups, oral and life histories, focused interviews, ethnography, civic mapping and textual analysis. For example, Iorio contributes a chapter that demonstrates how focused interviews caused editors and reporters at The Wichita Eagle to alter election coverage after they learned how different citizens' concerns were from the campaign aims of candidates. Susan Willey's chapter on the use of focus groups at the Savannah Morning News shows how journalists used the method to bring in more voices from the community. Kathryn B. Campbell provides a very detailed account of the use of civic mapping at such newspapers as The Tampa Tribune and The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., efforts that provided a broader mix of sourcing and understanding about social dynamics in communities. Two final chapters, one on the need to pair qualitative and quantitative methods by Susan Schultz Huxman and Mike Alien and another on newsroom and university partnerships by Jan Schaffer, address contextual issues beyond concerns with any single method.Most of the contributors have been involved with the promotion of public and civic journalism and use such projects in their explication of qualitative research in journalism, an approach that might put off journalists critical of civic journalism initiatives. However, the book's main epistemological problem is the failure of the book's authors to give adequate attention to some of the different assumptions among qualitative research methods. In an attempt to find the common ground between qualitative research and journalism, the authors engage in simplifications that can misrepresent methods in their purer forms."Using qualitative methods in journalism is not difficult," Iorio writes in her introductory chapter on "Qualitative method journalism." Yet, as any scholar who specializes in qualitative methodology knows, it is very difficult to do good qualitative studies. In-depth journalism is not easy to execute, either.Lewis A Friedland and Kathryn B. Campbell have a historical chapter exploring the Chicago School's approach to social science, which drew on journalistic observation and interviewing. …
Grounded Theory Review: An International Journal, 2006
Adherents to classic grounded theory have gotten used to spotting the pretenders working under th... more Adherents to classic grounded theory have gotten used to spotting the pretenders working under the grounded theory banner. Some of these faux-GT researchers have worked in a fog, misunderstanding fundamentals of the method; these are the studies that leave us shaking our heads and wondering about the doctoral committee and peer reviewers who did not bother to find out more about the method they were evaluating. More infuriating are the authors who are claiming to improve on grounded theory, to reground it, to quote one notable British author who, lack of handson grounded theory experience aside, manages a booklength critique of the method. Two recent books in the"remaking grounded theory" genre are from sociologists with some years of grounded theory projects behind them. Adele E. Clarke, author of Situational Analysis, was a student and colleague of Anselm L. Strauss at the University of California San Francisco. Kathy Charmaz, author of Constructing Grounded Theory, is among the few grounded theorists who studied with Barney G. Glaser and Strauss at UCSF.
This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of ... more This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of purposive attending proposes a feedback loop in which awareness increases relevance, which can increase attending, which can then reset awareness. This article focuses on two aspects of the broader theory: the ambivalence surrounding everyday news-attending and the role cultural identities such as gender and race might play in heightening that ambivalence. The work, influenced by Carey's call to treat news-attending in a ritual context, demonstrates how news-as-ritual and news-as-information-acquisition exist in daily tension. The work was developed using classic grounded theory methodology, which outlines protocols for building theory from data, which included interviews, participant observation with a book discussion group, and qualitative document analysis of news discussions in selected internet communities, letters to the editor, news articles, and industry reports.
Grounded Theory Review: An International Journal, 2015
The awareness context has been a source of inspiration for grounded theories for more than 50 yea... more The awareness context has been a source of inspiration for grounded theories for more than 50 years; yet little has been done to extend the theory beyond nursing and the medical field, and a few works on identity. This paper extends the awareness context by examining its role in several high-profile disasters, natural and man-made, where gaining a clear sense of what was going on was often blocked by poor information flow and general communication failures, interpersonal and technological. Selective coding and the introduction of new concepts after analyzing hundreds of pages of documents issued by special commissions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, and the Sago Mine Disaster not only explain various processes around awareness in the midst of crisis, but also illuminate pre-crisis patterns that, if attended, could have mitigated the impact of the disasters.
NRJ BooksQualitative Research in Journalism: Taking it to the Streets, edited by Sharon Hartin Io... more NRJ BooksQualitative Research in Journalism: Taking it to the Streets, edited by Sharon Hartin Iorio (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004) 235 pages, $27.50 (paperback).Journalists who conduct in-depth interviews or spend months observing people going about everyday routines are in many ways doing what academic qualitative researchers do. The contributors to this book use that common ground to present qualitative research methodology as a way to better ferret out the intricacies of everyday life that often go unreported.Sharon Hartin Iorio, editor of the collection, writes that there is a greater need for journalists to "link individuals' personal interests and common concerns and the larger issues that touch people's daily lives." For this, she argues, there is a greater need for training than ever. Iorio writes that in the same way that Philip Meyer's work in "precision journalism" increased journalists' comfort with statistics and quantitative methods, journalists are now taking up "qualitative method journalism," from case studies to ethnography, to document more of the concerns of everyday people. Qualitative methodology is promoted as a way to navigate what one chapter author, Clifford G. Christians, describes as a shift in the news paradigm from "objective to interpretive sufficiency."Much goes well in this book. Part I of the book consists of three chapters that provide historical context for qualitative research and current trends in journalism. Part II provides chapters focused on specific methods: case studies, focus groups, oral and life histories, focused interviews, ethnography, civic mapping and textual analysis. For example, Iorio contributes a chapter that demonstrates how focused interviews caused editors and reporters at The Wichita Eagle to alter election coverage after they learned how different citizens' concerns were from the campaign aims of candidates. Susan Willey's chapter on the use of focus groups at the Savannah Morning News shows how journalists used the method to bring in more voices from the community. Kathryn B. Campbell provides a very detailed account of the use of civic mapping at such newspapers as The Tampa Tribune and The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., efforts that provided a broader mix of sourcing and understanding about social dynamics in communities. Two final chapters, one on the need to pair qualitative and quantitative methods by Susan Schultz Huxman and Mike Alien and another on newsroom and university partnerships by Jan Schaffer, address contextual issues beyond concerns with any single method.Most of the contributors have been involved with the promotion of public and civic journalism and use such projects in their explication of qualitative research in journalism, an approach that might put off journalists critical of civic journalism initiatives. However, the book's main epistemological problem is the failure of the book's authors to give adequate attention to some of the different assumptions among qualitative research methods. In an attempt to find the common ground between qualitative research and journalism, the authors engage in simplifications that can misrepresent methods in their purer forms."Using qualitative methods in journalism is not difficult," Iorio writes in her introductory chapter on "Qualitative method journalism." Yet, as any scholar who specializes in qualitative methodology knows, it is very difficult to do good qualitative studies. In-depth journalism is not easy to execute, either.Lewis A Friedland and Kathryn B. Campbell have a historical chapter exploring the Chicago School's approach to social science, which drew on journalistic observation and interviewing. …
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