Advancing Comparative Media and Communication Research

Joseph M. Chan, Francis L. F. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351715881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A comparative approach to media and communication research plays an important, if not indispensable, role in achieving a core mission of researchers: to delimit the generality and specificity of media and communication theories, enabling researchers to more readily identify the influence of social, political and cultural contexts in shaping media and communication phenomena. To de-Westernize and internationalize media and communication studies has thus become the way forward for overcoming the parochialism of mainstream media and communication studies. This volume reflects on what comparative media and communication research has achieved or failed to achieve, the epistemological and theoretical challenges it is facing, and the new directions in which it should be heading.

1 Mapping Comparative Communication Research

What the Literature Reveals¹

Clement Y. K. So

Introduction

Most communication research is done within a specific time and place due to resource and manpower constraints. Scholars work in their own specialized area, and not many have tried to expand their scope of study by themselves or through collaboration with others. The growth of the research community around the world makes it more possible for a concerted effort in doing comparative research. Easier and better means of communication also encourages scholars situated in different locations to work hand in hand in studying the same topic.

The advantages of comparative research are obvious. Through comparison, we can see the diversity and changes over time and places. Various factors can be accounted for in the process, thus making theory construction and generalization more feasible. Just like the attraction of using multiple methods to solve a research problem, doing comparative research is always desirable despite the difficulties one has to overcome. Nevertheless, there seems to be a rising trend of doing comparative research in a number of disciplines, and communication is no exception.

The nature of comparative communication research is rather peculiar. It is not a traditional area of study like interpersonal communication or mass communication. There is no regular divisional status within major academic organizations like the ICA, AEJMC, or NCA. It is more a research orientation than a well-defined subject matter. People can do comparative research for a while, and then drop out of it. It may involve more manpower and require communication among researchers in different places. Many know that comparative research is interesting, but not many people actually participate in it. In sum, it is easier said than done. It is broader in scope, and it can be somewhat difficult to grasp its nature.

However, there are some dedicated scholars who have adopted this line of research practice. They apply a comparative perspective in their own research areas, and some have even looked at the principles, theories, and methodologies of comparative research in a general sense. Scholars have taken stock of the trade and offered their evaluation of the research scenes. While their expert judgments are usually useful and valuable, few have attempted to use empirical research data to do a comprehensive evaluation of comparative communication research.

The objective of the present work is to fill in some of the gaps in this regard. I wish to map the overall landscape of comparative communication research. The various components of this area will be identified and examined, including the construction of a representative sample of such kind of research. Among the chosen research outputs, relevant information to be extracted includes the year of publication, author, journal, university affiliation, type of publication, research method, media, country, etc. The citations in the references are of particular interest. We shall look into the cited authors and documents, and see if we can construct networks of relationships among them. After reviewing the empirical evidence, this chapter will conclude with a few words on the current status of comparative communication research and the possible ways for improvement.

Literature Review

The history of doing comparative communication research may date back to many decades, but the effort to summarize and rethink the orientation and strategies has a shorter life span. In this brief review, I will only look at how different scholars summarized and evaluated comparative communication research. The substantive comparative studies on various communication topics are not the focus here. Next, we shall revisit some of the major efforts along the time line since the 1980s.

An early major effort was the book Comparative Communication Research written by Edelstein (1982). Edelstein defined it as “a major conceptual and methodological area of study in the field of international communication” (p. 13). To him, the meaning of “comparative” was rather straightforward: the comparison of two or more nations with regard to some common activity. He explained the need to do comparative communication research and the ways to do it. He summarized a number of major studies to highlight the conceptual and methodological approaches in this area of research. Later, he teamed up with others to publish the book Communication and Culture: A Comparative Approach (Edelstein, Ito, & Kepplinger, 1989).

It seems that comparative communication research, to some scholars, was synonymous with international communication. They took a cultural and critical perspective by questioning the international power structure among nations. The dominance of the United States in theoretical and methodological developments may not be a desirable outcome. Alternative approaches were called for to achieve more contextualization (Hart, 1988; Lester-massman, 1991). Based on empirical evidence from journal publications on comparative international communication, it was found that there were issues including the lack of theoretical framework, nonequivalence of concepts and indicators, and incomparability of units of analysis (Chang, et al., 2001).

On the theoretical side, Livingstone (2003) examined epistemological debates and challenges of comparative communication research. She identified a number of key issues including country selection, methodological standardization, relation between theory and data, interpretation problem, and contextualization. The practical difficulties in doing this kind of research were explored by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012b). It was a challenge to coordinate collaborative research across different nations. Different models were proposed and problems discussed by them.

A milestone is The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research edited by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012a). This book represents a major effort to comprehensively summarize and evaluate the various aspects of comparative communication research. It provides rationales for doing such research and points out future directions and different perspectives. There are nine “disciplines” covered, such as political communication, organization communication, and development communication. It also has a dozen “central research areas” for comparison of media systems, media policy and regulation, media markets, media cultures, etc., as well as a section on conceptual and methodological issues on comparative communication research.

There were other concerns discussed by different scholars. Qualitative and quantitative methods in comparative research were compared in different academic disciplines (Ragin, 1987). Kohn (1989) discussed cross-national research as some kind of analytic strategy. Van de Vijver and Leung (1997) were particularly interested in the methods and data for cross-cultural research. Esser (2013) linked this type of research in cross-national settings with the background of globalization.

The subarea of comparative political communication research deserves a special mention. It occupies a distinct niche in the past 10 years. Esser and Pfetsch (2004a) edited the book Comparing Political Communication: Theories, Cases, and Challenges and gathered a number of reviews about this subarea. The two editors talked about reorienting the subject matter (Esser & Pfetsch, 2004b). Wirth and Kolb (2004) reviewed its designs and methods, and raised the problems of comparability and equivalence. Gurevitch and Blumler (2004) attempted again to assess the state of this subarea to see whether it was mature enough. Compared to their previous reviews (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1975; Gurevitch & Blumler, 1990), they saw some obvious developments, but there were still conceptual inadequacies. On the other hand, Stevenson (2004) focused on the problems of doing comparative communication research. He advocated the importance of culture in changing times. Later on, Norris (2009) proposed some common frameworks. The latest review was done by Pfetsch and Esser (2012) in the handbook edited by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012a). They proposed to compare political communication in terms of the structures, cultures, messages, and effects.

Research Method and Data sources

To assess the situation of a research area, using quantitative content analysis is a logical choice. The key is to find a large and representative sample of materials. One obvious source of information is the Social Sciences Citation Index in the Web of Science. This is perhaps the largest database of research articles with high quality. At this time, however, it has some weaknesses. It primarily includes journal articles, but it is also quite selective in its inclusion of just the “high-quality” journals. Non-English entries are few.

Another popular venue is Google Scholar. It is more inclusive in the types of publications, and it does not have a fixed pool of journals only. Yet its strengths are also its weaknesses. The quality of the materials found in Google Scholar can be quite uneven. The information from the search results may be incomplete or inaccurate. Still another way for data searching is the conventional library books. Researchers have to rely on certain prior understanding of the content under examination.

The above three sources have their pros and cons, and together they seem to complement one another well. Thus, we use all three sources of data for the study. The first one is the Handbook of Comparative Communication Research edited by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012a). It contains 32 review articles covering the various disciplinary developments, central research areas, and conceptual and methodological issues. The collection of articles from a total of 51 contributors represents a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the state of comparative communication research in the early 2010s.

The second source of data is from the Web of Science. As of January 17, 2015, using the two words “comparative” and “research” under “topic search” yielded a total of 33,133 documents. I used “comparative research” (connected together) to narrow the scope down to 2,452. Further narrowing down the scope, I only focused on the research area of communication. There were 75 documents including all sorts of publications. If only journal articles and book chapters were included, the number slightly dropped to 71. A careful examination of these documents revealed that some of them were not really studies in a comparative sense. Finally, 56 documents were included for the current study.

The third source of data is from Google Scholar. Using “comparative communication research” as the search topic, a total of 347 documents were found. Some of them were not relevant to the topic, and some of them overlapped with the previous Web of Science search. A small portion was not published in English, and a few documents could not be found. After excluding the above, 59 documents were selected from Google Scholar.

Combining the three data sources, we have a total of 147 documents for actual data analysis. Out of these, 94 are journal articles and 43 are book chapters. The rest (10) include reports, dissertations, and conference papers (see Table 1.1). The reasons for the exclusion of full-length books in the sample are that books about comparative communication research are rare in the first place, and they are not on par with journal articles and book chapters in terms of citations cited. The use of the edited book by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012a) as the first data source is quite adequate for the purpose.

Table 1.1 Types of Publications in Comparative Communication Research

Characteristics of Comparative Communication Research

With the 147 documents selected, we can examine these documents in terms of a number of aspects. First, the time period of publication should warrant inspection as it can tell us whether this area of research is growing and by how much. Second, we wish to know who are the more active scholars in the area of comparative communication research, and which schools they are/were affiliated with. The coauthorship should also be interesting to note, as comparative research may involve scholars from different schools or countries. Third, the journals as venue of publication, as well as the specific foci of the sampled documents, can reveal the subject matters of inquiry in comparative communication research. It is also helpful to know the types of research methods used and the specific media studied by the scholars. Of particular concern is the subject of comparison in these studies. What are actually compared? Is the focus mainly on cross-national comparison or are there some other aspects for comparison? Naturally, country as a variable should be looked at in detail.

Table 1.2 clearly shows that the area of comparative communication research has experienced a phenomenal growth in the past 20 years. A total of 95% of the sampled documents are from the period of 1995–2014. Even when we do not include the 32 book chapters from Esser and Hanitzsch’s edited book, the period between 2010 and 2014 still has more than half (55.7%) of the total sample.

Table 1.2 Time Periods of Publications and Citations in Comparative Communication Research

From the 147 documents, we can identify 22 scholars who are more active in the area of comparative communication research. As shown in Table 1.3, most of them (N = 16) are from Europe and some of them (5) are from the United States. Apart from these places, there is only one ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Mapping Comparative Communication Research: What the Literature Reveals
• 2 Can We Compare Media Systems?
• 3 Mapping Comparative Research on Television Foreign News
• 4 The Unbearable Lightness of Communication for Development and Social Change
• 5 Comparative Guanxi Research Following the Commensurability/Incommensurability (C/I) Model
• 6 Beyond Positivism of Big Data Analysis: Toward Discursive Geographies and the ‘Reflexive’ Interdependence of Communicative Relations
• 7 Thinking through the City: A Comparative, Ecological, and Globally Oriented Approach
• 8 Broadening Conceptions of Mobile and Its Social Dynamics
• 9 The Global–Local Communication Synchronization: China’s Response to the SARS Outbreak and the Air Pollution Crisis
• 10 Domestication of Foreign News Considered Comparatively: Variable Applications and Relationships with Audience Interests
• 11 Cultural Capital and Affect at Work: A Case Study of the Korean and Chinese TV Drama Meteor Shower
• 12 Research Network and Comparative Communication Studies: Practice and Reflections
• List of Contributors
• Index