Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.
One of the first things you learn in research is that your overarching question or hypothesis dictates your research method.
At the most basic level, if you’re looking at measurable variables, you know you’ll be doing quantitative research. And if you’re interested in causal relations between variables, you basically must conduct a controlled experiment. That tight control allows you to make assertions about causation because you’ve ruled out alternative explanations for your findings. Hard but fun research.
In the case of journalism as a conversation, the academic literature is replete with qualitative, descriptive studies but little quantitative, empirical work. That was a key signal I had a potential gap to exploit in the literature.
The more important gap was that it appeared no one had actually tried to measure the phenomenon of conversation in any systematic way.
My doctoral mission was set: Figure out how to define the thing we talk about and then carefully measure it in the context of plummeting circulations and audience shares, bankruptcies and closures and waning credibility. The big question: What are the actual features/variables of conversation?
The chase was on …
