Visual Communication Research Designs

Keith Kenney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135859268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Visual Communication Research Designs provides a step-by-step guide for designing research involving visuals relevant to communications media. This volume explains the process from conceptualization to research questions, instrumentation, analysis, and reliability and validity checks. It also addresses the lack of sufficient methods to answer theoretical questions attending visual communication. This resource has been developed in response to the circumstance in which, in many cases, the methodologies used for verbal and textual communications are inappropriate or ineffective when applied or adapted for the study of visual communications. Additionally, research articles from ethnography, action research, rhetoric, semiotics, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory often do not use examples appropriate to visual communication readers. To address these issues, this book explains in clear and straightforward language key research designs, including new methodologies, that are appropriate for scholars and students conducting visual communication research.

Organized into three parts -- production, analysis, and effects of visuals – this research text provides guidance in using, interpreting and measuring the effects of visual images.

It addresses such topics as:

• 
  
  

• producing photographs and video that can be used as research data;

• 
  
  

• interpreting images that already exist;

• 
  
  

• measuring the effects of visuals and to understand their use by different groups.

Ethical issues are included, as well as a discussion of the advantages and limitations of each method. "War stories" are provided by experienced researchers, who discuss a particular research project and explain pitfalls to avoid, as well as what to do when problems occur.

The primary audiences are scholars, researchers, and students conducting research on motion pictures, video, television, photographs, illustrations, graphics, typography, political cartoons, comic books, animation, and other media with a visual component. Individuals will use this text whenever they need to conduct research that involves visuals in the media. The book will be a required text for advanced courses in visual culture, seminars on visual communication research, and other research methods courses integrating a visual component.

1 Like an Espresso but Without the Insomnia

Explanation of the Title

Visual Communication Research Designs—the title’s meaning may seem obvious, but I will be changing the meaning of some of these words, so please read carefully.

First, I define communication as a social process. Communication is social because it involves interactions between people. Communication is a process because it consists of an ongoing series of exchanges. In these exchanges, one person uses symbols to intentionally send a message; then others interpret the message’s meaning and respond. With this definition, mass media are not in the communication business. Mass media are in the information business, the entertainment business, the persuasion business, and the money-making business. People may seem to interact with the media when they talk back to a TV program, and they may seem to be engaged in a process when they become hooked on media content, but people are not really communicating with a medium (TV), a company (CBS), a show (CSI Miami), or an actor (David Caruso). On the other hand, I include mass media in this book because so many people think of the media when they think of visual communication.

Next, I define visuals by example. Visuals include drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, films, computer graphics, animations, and virtual reality displays. Visuals do not include sculpture and architecture, which belong to the plastic arts. Nor do visuals include the performing arts, such as music, theater, and dance.

Next, I define visual communication as a social process in which people exchange messages that include visuals. Visual communication differs from visual display. You know something is a visual display when one person uses visuals to express ideas or feelings, but that person does not particularly care who sees the visuals, when they see the visuals, or whether they respond to the visuals. Creators of the visuals, however, hope their audience will understand at least some of their intended meaning.

Next is research. To conduct research means to investigate. Scholars may use the scientific method to investigate a phenomenon or they may use some other method, such as an analytic, critical, historical, or legal method, but their goal is to advance human understanding. Their forms of data collection and analysis are open to invention, and a critical community judges the value of their efforts.

Rather than dividing research into scientific versus non-scientific camps, however, I prefer to divide research into three groups: investigations based on the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. To make some gross generalizations, natural science researchers use experiments and other quantitative methods to study the rules of nature. They accurately observe and objectively measure things that they can see. Social science researchers study people, not nature. They use interviews, observations, analysis of documents, and other qualitative methods to interpret the meaning of people’s lives. Some of the things they study, such as thoughts and feelings, cannot easily be observed or measured. Humanities researchers also study people, but they do not use scientific methods. Instead they use analytic or critical methods to understand how culture influences people and how people influence culture. Humanities include the fields of history, law, literature, languages, philosophy, religion, the performing arts, and the visual arts.

I think of the social sciences as straddling the natural sciences and the humanities because people interact with nature’s rules and they interact with culture. When a natural force acts upon people or when people act upon nature, then the natural sciences provide a suitable role model. On the other hand, when culture influences people and when people influence culture, then humanities provide a better model. Social scientists must pick from both models and also must make compromises.

All three groups conduct research that is appropriate for their goals and questions, but society does not value all three equally. Our culture currently believes that natural sciences are superior to social sciences, which are superior to the humanities. Since this is a culture-based belief and not one of nature’s rules, it can change from place to place and time to time. Meanwhile, however, the ways that natural science researchers advance human understanding have more legitimacy, authority, power, and funding than the ways that humanities researchers advance human understanding.

So where does the communication field fit into this three-group classification? To me it seems obvious that communication can fit into the humanities side of the social science group because communication is governed by culture more than by nature’s rules. Many communications scholars want to follow the natural science model, which has more authority and funding, but, as I said, communication involves people and culture, not nature. If you agree, then qualitative, analytic, and critical methods should be used to study communication.

And where does visual communication fit? I believe visual communication, as a subset of communication, fits into the humanities side of social science. This idea, however, may disturb my school’s senior faculty members, who were trained to use quantitative methods, not qualitative, analytic, or critical methods. They might be thinking, “No tables with statistics? No levels of significance? No intercoder reliability?” They simply might not understand how to conduct or evaluate such research, and they might be suspicious of the unknown.

Next, I define a research design as a plan for how the investigation will be conducted. As a plan, a research design deals with four problems: what questions to study, what information is relevant, how to collect that information, and how to analyze the information. A research design, therefore, enables you to link the investigation’s research questions with its conclusions.

Finally, we return to the beginning—visual communication research designs. Confusion may arise about whether the phrase refers to research about visuals or whether it refers to any research that uses visual technology. For this book, the answer is both and more. You can use visual communication research designs to study visuals that were created by participants or researchers. You can also use visual communication research designs to study participant-created visuals and researcher-created visuals. In this book:

• Three of the research designs involve a non-visual method (interviews, discourse analysis, and interpretive analysis) to study visuals that people had created without prompting from a researcher.
• Two designs involve a non-visual method (diaries, case study) to analyze visuals that people knew a researcher would want to study.
• One research design involves a non-visual method (focus group) to study visuals that the researchers had created.
• Two designs ask participants to create visuals (draw-and-write technique, Photovoice).
• One research design requires that the researcher create visuals (visual ethnography).

Goals

My contributors and I had several goals in mind as we wrote this book.

One, we want to tell you something new and interesting about visuals. To meet this goal, we begin each chapter with a brief story. For example, we explain:

• Why people really include visuals on Facebook.
• Why Picasso could draw but barely pass elementary school.
• How you can use camera phones for intimate communication.
• Why Zana Briski created the Oscar-winning documentary film Born into Brothels.
• How a professor with Skype could serve on a virtual thesis committee.
• How Lauren Greenfield created the visuals for the book and film called Thin.
• How prosecutors used visual persuasion to help convict Michael Skakel of murder.
• How photos in Life magazine maintained power relationships and ideologies.
• How the media contribute to the sexualization of Miley Cyrus and other girls.

In fact, you will find stories throughout the book about how people use visuals.

Two, we advocate mending the split in communications programs. At the university where I work, communication is taught in two completely separate departments. You can study mass media, such as advertising, public relations, television, and newspapers in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications; or you can study speech and rhetoric at the interpersonal or public levels of communication in the English Department. This split may have made sense at one time, but with the tremendous influence of the Internet, it does more harm than good. We use the Internet as a worldwide mass medium as well as to send and to receive personal e-mail messages. We also join chat rooms, which resemble group or public communication. And we use intranets for organizational communication. People are creating content and distributing content for one other family member, 20 friends, 200 employees, and millions of strangers in multiple cultures. By explaining research designs at all levels of communication, this book demonstrates the value of thinking about communication as a single field, with a common set of theoretical perspectives and methods.

Three, we want to tell you something new and interesting about research designs. If your graduate program focuses on quantitative research, then use this book to learn about the other types of research—qualitative and humanistic research. If your graduate program focuses on qualitative research, then think of this book—like espresso—as a stimulant. It will stimulate your interest in additional research designs. You will learn how to use draw-and-tell, Photovoice, diaries, case studies, discourse analysis, and content interpretive analysis. We hope you will be so excited after reading these chapters that you will lose sleep thinking about when and how to apply them to your own research.

Four, we want to provide practical, systematic guidance on how to design visual communication research studies. It seems obvious to us that you would want to learn how to conduct visual communication research. Not only is such work fun, it is also rewarding. Academia needs visual communication professors to teach all of its photography, graphics, video, and Web design courses. Academia also wants to hire professors who can conduct research. Finding visual communication teacher-researchers, however, is difficult because the field is so new. In fact, no communications doctoral program emphasizes visual communication. And even if such a program existed, students could not find books to help them learn how to conduct visual communication research. Until now. Visual Communication Research Designs is the first book that explains how to design visual communication research studies.

To continue with our goals for this book, a fifth goal is to explain our ideas as clearly as possible. You may have already noticed some of our techniques. First, we frequently number our points so that you can follow our thinking step by step. Second, we use active voice, which means that you always know who said or did something. Third, we use concrete examples to clarify and reinforce our abstract points. Fourth, we boldface words when we first define them and we include boldfaced words and their definitions in the glossary at the end of the book. Fifth, we avoid wordiness so you will not have to sort through the clutter to find the essential idea. Sixth, we use short sentences so that you will not need to absorb too many ideas at once. Seventh, we hope you have noticed the lack of jargon. Eighth, we include figures in order to visually as well as verbally present our ideas.

Like all authors, we need goals when writing, but we also need to know if we have met our goals. We will only know if we have succeeded if you either buy this book or you send us an e-mail message. We hope you will do both. Contact Keith Kenney at [email protected].

Organization

Most books about research design include a separate chapter about theory, research questions, sampling, methods, analysis, and ethics. In this book, we cover these same topics, and more, but not in separate chapters. Instead, we have a theory section for each of the nine chapters. We also have a research questions section for each of the nine chapters. In fact, we write about 15 different topics in each of the nine chapters.

The book’s format offers advantages and some potential disadvantages. One advantage is that you can learn nine complete research designs from start to finish rather than having to assemble parts of research designs from different chapters. Another advantage is that you can easily compare research designs, and, as you know, you can understand one thing better when you can compare it to others. A third advantage is that each method for collecting data is directly connected to a theoretical perspective. This is important because theory influences method and method influences theory. A possible disadvantage to this format would be redundancy. We’ve tried to avoid redundancy by describing a variety of theoretical perspectives, goals, methods, units of analysis, and so on. Moreover, instead of repeating content, we simply refer you to the place in the book where we discuss that topic. Another potential disadvantage is that you may not realize there is no one right way to do anything in qualitative research. We organized the material so that we explain one way of analyzing data in Chapter 3, but that might not be the ONLY way to analyze such data. You could try using the data analysis method covered in Chapter 4, for example. Another potential disadvantage is that you may think that the qualitative research process follows a straight line from beginning to end. It does not. A graphic of the research process would include lots of arrows pointing in both directions and looping around from the bottom up to the top. Each aspect of the process would be connected to several other aspects.

Table 1.1a Overview of the research designs.

Table 1.1b Overview of the methods and analysis sections

Table 1.1c (Dis)advantages, ethical issues, and required resources

Each chapter begins with a discussion of a theoretical perspective, which is a general explanation of what is going on with the people, events, and settings you plan to study. Based upon this general explanation, you can begin to refine your goals, develop relevant research questions, select appropriate methods, and identify potential threats to the quality of your conclusions. After completing the research process, you will connect your particular conclusions back to the larger issues of the theoretical perspective. Although few people may care about your particular study, many scholars and practitioners should be interested in how your study ontributes to the theoretical perspective.

Some of this book’s theoretical perspectives include well-defined communication theories, such as the Coordinated Management of Meaning, the Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy, and Cultivation theory. Other theoretical perspectives include new and still under-developed maps of relatively unexplored territory. For example, we try to explain a) a visual symbol system’s role in society, and b) how access to visual information can improve coordination. Other chapters’ theoretical perspectives resemble a general group of ideas more than a specific theory. For example, we discuss Paulo Freire’s ideas about conscientization and anthropologists’ ideas about organizational culture.

With a theoretical perspective in place, the second section covers possible goals. Your goals explain why you want to conduct a particular research study. You may have personal goals. For example, you might want to a) improve some situation you are involved in; b) satisfy your curiosity about a topic; or c) advance your career (Maxwell, 2005). You may have practical goals. For example, you might want to influence some policy or practice. Or you may have intellectual goals. For example, you might want to a) understand the meaning of something; b) understand how a particular context influences the way people act; c) generate new theory; d) understand a process; and e) explain why something happened. This book covers goals related to: basic research, applied research, action research, and evaluation research, which will be explained later.

The third section—research questions—tells you what you most want to understand so you can start channeling your energy in that direction. They are more general and vague than hypotheses.

Qualitative researchers prefer research questions because they begin their investigations with general thoughts about a phenomenon. As they strive to make sense of their general thoughts, they collect a lot of data. They conclude their research process with a general statement that explains their data. Quantitative researchers prefer hypotheses because they begin their investigations with a review of the literature, which gives them a specific idea about a phenomenon. To confirm their idea, they follow a standard procedure for collecting data. They conclude their research process by stating that the data either confirm their initial idea or, occasionally, that they were surprised by their findings.

To use a detective analogy, qualitative researchers keep searching for clues until they identify the criminal. They go wherever their clues lead and take as long as needed. On the other hand, quantitative researchers receive a tip from a stranger, and they follow department policies in order to confirm the tip. Quantitative researchers continue to investigate their initial suspect until they can arrest the suspect, or … if they received a bad tip or if they botched their inquiry, they start over, with a new suspect and/or a new investigation.

The fourth section provides a brief description of the method for collecting data so that you can easily connect the general theoretical perspective with the method. Later, in the methods section, you learn the details of how to interview, observe, solicit diaries, conduct focus groups, and so on.

The fifth section identifies the units of analysis, which, in general, are related to your research questions. Your research questions specify what the study is about. If they concern the meaning of photographs, then photographs are your unit of analysis. If your research questions concern sexual behavior on TV programs and in movies, then your unit of analysis might be scenes of sexual behavior in those media. When determining the units of analysis, you also need to think ahead to the end of the research process. You need to ask yourself what type of analysis you plan to do. If you are going to code symbols in drawings, then symbols are your unit of analysis. If you are going to analyze how sending a photo message causes a change in intimacy, then photo messages are your unit of analysis.

The sixth section concerns sampling. Researchers care abou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Like an Espresso but Without the Insomnia
• 2 Putting Your Best “Cyberface” Forward
• 3 I Don’t Want to Talk About It; I Want to Draw It!
• 4 Reach Out and Hug Someone
• 5 We Shall Act and Overcome, Together
• 6 Working for Two Universities 5,000 Miles Apart
• 7 Traditions are Group Efforts to Prevent the Unexpected
• 8 That Story’s Ridiculous; Look, Here’s What Happened
• 9 Everything You Wanted to Know, but Were Powerless to Ask
• 10 Sex on TV: A Content Interpretive Analysis
• Glossary
• References