सोमवार, 15 दिसंबर 2014
शनिवार, 13 दिसंबर 2014
Qualitative and quantitative analysis in mass media
INTRODUCTION
In this assignment I will
explain the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative
research and give relative examples relating them to the mass media.
Quantitative Research is
research that is collected and data that is absolute, for example numerical
data and it is usually displayed in graphs and tallies, so that it can be
compeered in as unbiased and quick way, therefore one advantage of quantitative
research is that the research is unable to be bias and it is very easy and
quick to read, so it is very good to use for presentations.
Advantages of Quantitative
research is that the results are easily analyzed and easy to compare against
other data; this comes useful when magazine company wants to know how much more
popular or unpopular a competing magazine is, because the research is
statistically reliable it gives the company a good indication of whose selling
the most issues. For example a magazine such as ‘India Today’ will want to know
how well their competitors are doing such as ‘Outlook’.
Qualitative research is
research that requires a more in-depth response, it allows you to ask personal
question and collect more data on people, this is best used in T.V shows when
they get the personal response from viewers, It allows them to find out about
how some people feel about a certain story line and weather they think it will
be appropriate, for example, Eastenders regularly like to know whose watching their
program and what they think about it and the current story line.
Qualitative of research
is easily accessible, this is useful for companies who need to access the
information easily and quickly, this works out well for the film industries
when they ask people coming out of the cinema weather they thought the film was
any good.
DISCOURSE ON QUANTITATIVE VS
QUALITATIVE IN MASS MEDIA
Debates on qualitative versus
quantitative research have reached their peak and today qualitative research is
accepted as a normal set of approaches among others. Media research has long
been dominated by quantitative methods and contributed much to their
development in the whole field of social sciences. Today, sociology, education
and also, in part, communication science make wide use of qualitative methods.
In general, it is not always clear what is meant by qualitative research. Often
it is associated with data gathering by ethnography and open interviewing as
opposed to standardized surveys. It is important to note that qualitative
methodology consists of data collection and data analysis. There has been much
development in general methodology, strongly connected to epistemological
considerations on how it is possible to perceive reality. Methods of data
collection are also very developed; most difficulties are connected to rules
for qualitative data analysis.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Qualitative
Research is primarily exploratory research.
It is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and
motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or
hypotheses for potential quantitative research. Qualitative Research is also
used to uncover trends in thought and opinions, and dive deeper into the
problem. Qualitative data collection methods vary using unstructured or
semi-structured techniques. Some common methods include focus groups (group
discussions), individual interviews, and participation/observations. The sample
size is typically small, and respondents are selected to fulfill a given quota.
The
qualitative tradition in mass communication research may have been relatively
slow in developing its contributions to the field in the form of journals,
conferences, textbooks, and handbooks, at least compared to mainstream
quantitative work. This has been due, in part, to factors of social history, as
already noted: the dominant social construction of reality for a long time has
remained quantitative, not least among the sociopolitical agents and
institutions that confer legitimacy and funding on science, thus creating a
structural bias against qualitative studies
Three types of Qualitative methods
TABLE
6.1
|
COMPARISON
OF QUALITATIVE METHODS
|
||
METHOD
|
STUDY
FOCUS
|
ANALYTIC
FOCUS
|
DISCIPLINES
|
Ethnography
|
culture/cultural
group
|
describe
a culture/cultural group
|
Cultural
Anthropology
|
Grounded
Theory
|
cultural
groups
|
generate
theory about a basic social process
|
Sociology/
Symbolic Interaction/ Criminology
|
Phenomenology
|
individual
experience
|
discern
the essence of the lived experience
|
Philosophy/
Psychology/ Sociology
|
Approach
of Qualitative Research
n Qualitative research – different
assumptions/ approach than quantitative research
n Emphasis on seeing the world from the
eyes of the participants
n Strive to make sense of phenomena in terms
of the meanings people bring to them
n Holistic emphasis – studying the
person, group, culture in the natural setting
Step in quantitative research
Quantitative (Linear)
↓ Define a Research Problem/Question
↓ Review the Literature
↓ Formulate Hypothesis or Refine Question
↓ Make Operational Definitions
↓ Design or Select Instruments for Data
↓ Obtain Ethical Approval
↓ Collect Data
↓ Analyze Data
↓ Interpret Findings – Refer to Literature Again
↓ Determine Implications – Draw Conclusions
Core
Activities in Qualitative Research
Qualitative approaches on:
- Literature review
- Explicating researcher’s beliefs
- Role of participants: subject or informant?
- Selection of participants
- Setting for data collection
- Approach to data analysis
- Saturation
Data
Collection Methods in Qualitative Studies in mass media
n Three data collection strategies
introduced:
1.
Participant observation
2.
In-depth interviews
3.
Focus group interviews
n Qualitative researchers may combine
more than one method
Methods
of Evaluating Qualitative Research in mass media
n Developing
standards of quality Lincoln and Guba’s classic work shed light on how to
assess truth in a qualitative report
n Offered
four alternate tests of quality that reflect the assumptions of the qualitative
paradigm:
·
Credibility
·
Dependability
·
Transferability
·
Confirmability
Advantages and Limitations
n Focus
on the whole of the human experience and the meanings ascribed to them by
participants
n They
provide the researcher with deep insights that would not be possible using
quantitative methods
n The
major strength of qualitative work is the validity of the data it produces
n Participants
true reality is likely to be reflected
n Major
limitation is its perceived lack of objectivity and generalizability
n Researchers
become the research tools and may lack objectivity
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Quantitative
Research is used to quantify the problem by way of generating numerical data or
data that can be transformed into useable statistics. It is used to quantify
attitudes, opinions, behaviors, and other defined variables – and generalize
results from a larger sample population. Quantitative Research uses measurable
data to formulate facts and uncover patterns in research. Quantitative data
collection methods are much more structured than Qualitative data collection
methods. Quantitative data collection methods include various forms of surveys
– online surveys, paper surveys, mobile surveys and kiosk surveys, face-to-face
interviews, telephone interviews, longitudinal studies, website interceptors,
online polls, and systematic observations.
Burns
& Grove (1987)
“...
a formal, objective, systematic process in which numerical data are utilized to
obtain information about the world" and "a research method which is
used to describe and test relationships and to examine cause-and-effect
relationships".
Types
n Experimental
n Survey
n Meta-Analysis
n Quantitative
Case Study
n Applied
Behavior Analysis
n Longitudinal
Approach
of Quantitative Research
n Empirical
Verification through observation or experimentation
n Ruling
out simple explanations prior to adopting complex ones
n Cause-Effect
n Probability
of response
n Replication
of response
Step
in quantitative research
Pros
of Quantitative Research
n Clear interpretations
n Make sense of and organize
perceptions
n Careful scrutiny (logical,
sequential, controlled)
n Reduce researcher bias
n Results may be understood by
individuals in other disciplines
Cons
of Quantitative Research
However the information
collected in a Quantitative method doesn’t give you additional information for
example the emotions, motives, feelings and opinions of the subject are not
taken into account.
Another disadvantage may be
that the data would need regularly updating so this could lead into spending
more money, for example a T.V show would need to do test each week to find out
the amount of ratings they have and compeer them with previous data collected
to see if the popularity of the programme is increasing or decreasing, and
depending on the ratings they receive would play a major part in determining
the out-come of the show.
n Can
not assist in understanding issues in which basic variables have not been
identified or clarified
n Only 1 or 2 questions can be studied at a time,
rather than the whole of an event or experience
n Complex
issues (emotional response, personal values, etc.) can not always be reduced to
numbers
Example of Quantitative
research in mass media
If a research project used a
survey to assess the impact of English language
mass media on how NRI immigrants in the New
Delhi area adapt to their new environment. In addition to mass media use, the
survey also took into account cultural preferences, language fluency, and
demographics as possible predictors of cultural adaptation NRI immigrants in a
large and multicultural metropolitan area of the India . Hypotheses were tested
by using bivariate correlations to determine the relationships between the
independent (language, media use, demographics) and dependent (cultural
adaptation) variables. In addition, a discussion of intercultural communication
and some characteristics of the Non Residential Indian community are provided.
CONCLUSION
Qualitative
research, one of the two primary approaches to the conduct of social science
research, is a superior means for conducting meaningful research mass
media. The numerous advantages of
qualitative methods provide a depth of understanding of mass media system and
processing that far exceeds that offered by detached, statistical
analyses. Because of the differences in
the data, how data is collected and analyzed, and what the data and analyses
are able to tell us about our subjects of study, the knowledge gained through
qualitative investigations is more informative, richer and offers enhanced
understandings compared to that which can be obtained via quantitative
research.
The
superiority of qualitative research arises from the core differences in what
qualitative and quantitative research are, and what they are able to contribute
to bodies of knowledge vents, people, interactions, settings/cultures and
experience. As one leading proponent of
qualitative methods has explained, “Quality refers to the what, how, when, and
where of a thing – its essence and ambience.
Qualitative research thus refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions,
characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions of things.” (Berg, 2007,
p. 3). Notice that what is missing from
this definition is the “amount” or quantity of whatever it is that is being
studied. The number, or numerical
descriptions of things and their relationships is not The focus of qualitative
research, that is the focus of the “other” form of social science research:
quantitative
methods. Quantitative research is typically considered to be the more
“scientific” approach to doing social science.
The focus is on using specific definitions and carefully
operationalizing what particular concepts and variables mean. Qualitative research methods provide more
emphasis on interpretation and providing consumers with complete views, looking
at contexts, environmental immersions and a depth of understanding of concepts
So, why should social scientists use qualitative methods? What is the benefit of such an approach to
the study ofmass media? In simple terms,
qualitative methods are about gaining true understandings of the social aspects
of how crime occurs and how the agents, structures and processes of responding
to crime operate in c ulturall y-grounded contexts. Qualitative methods provide a depth of
understanding of issues that is not possible through the use of quantitative,
statistically-based investigations.
Qualitative methods are the approach that Centralizes and places primary
value on complete understandings, and how people (the social aspect of our
discipline) understand, experience and operate within milieus that are dynamic,
and social in their foundation and structure.
REFERENCES
शुक्रवार, 12 दिसंबर 2014
Writing styles in New Media
INTRODUCTION
Writing style refers to the manner in which an author chooses to write to his or her audience. A style reveals both the writer's personality and voice, but it also shows how he or she perceives the audience. The choice of a conceptual writing style molds the Writing style refers to the manner in which an author chooses to write to his or her audience. A style reveals both the writer's personality and voice, but it also shows how he or she perceives the audience. The choice of a conceptual writing style molds the overall character of the work. This occurs through changes in syntactical structure, parsing prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of thought into usable frameworks. Overall character of the work. This occurs through changes in syntactical structure, parsing prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of thought into usable frameworks.
A writer’s style is what sets his or her writing apart and makes it unique. Style is the way writing is dressed up to fit the specific context, purpose, or audience. Word choice, sentence fluency, and the writer’s voice — all contribute to the style of a piece of writing. How a writer chooses words and structures sentences to achieve a certain effect is also an element of style. When Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he arranged his words to convey a sense of urgency and desperation. Had he written “These are bad times,” it’s likely he wouldn’t have made such an impact!
Style is usually considered to be the province of literary writers. But journalists have distinctive styles, and they need to know how to vary their styles to fit different audiences. For example, the first-person narrative style of a popular magazine like National Geographic is quite different from the objective, third-person expository style of a research journal like Scientific American, even though both are written for informational purposes.
Writing for the Web and the writing for traditional print media is quite different. Web users do not merely read online content, they interact with it, because unlike print media, online media are not static or one-way, or at least they shouldn’t be. Hypertext allows this interaction, or “reading,” to be non-hierarchical and non-linear, more like entering a matrix and moving around within it than reading left to right, line by line. “Writers of hypertext . . . might be described as the designers and builders of an information ‘space’ to be explored by their readers,”
WRITING STYLE OF NEW MEDIA AND CONCISION, TONE & NUANCE
When we write on new media, our natural ability to express ourselves may remind us that writing per se isn’t always the problem. Formal academic writing for an audience that seems both inscrutable and implacable can easily undermine our confidence. An opportunity to write more freely—with less anxiety about audience—can be a great reminder of our own writing ability. Similarly, blogging allows us to find smaller topics and articulate what we want to say about them in a compact format.
But is there also a relationship between new media and the act of composition at the sentence level? Using social media often means learning to use language in a somewhat different way: our register is different; our vocabulary is different; our grammar may even be different. We embrace certain forms of informality (because Twitter). We develop a store of short words—‘apt’ is particularly handy when space is tight—and a greater appreciation of strong verbs. We treat grammar in ways that we daren’t in our academic writing; that is, we assume a sympathetic audience who will know what we mean even when we bend the rules. Even though we don’t turn around and write these terse but friendly sentences in our academic writing, the process of writing on new media can give us great insight into the boundaries of a strong sentence.Even in the more spacious confines of a blog, our style may be affected by the fact that a blog post is written in a compressed time frame
CONCISION
The first thing that will come to anyone’s mind when we think of writing on social media is brevity. Trying to say something in less than 140 characters, for instance, requires that we bring a whole new level of attention to concision. Even if we don’t always use those strategies in our everyday writing, we are forced to notice the potency of concision. If you regularly write extremely short sentences, you are inevitably honing your brevity skills. In doing so, you are bound to experience some of the benefits of limitation. Sometimes we will encounter the limits of limitation—i.e., the point at which something can’t be any shorter—but we will also learn the value of expressing ourselves in fewer words than we thought possible.
TONE
One of the best ways to understand the role of tone in writing is by having to shift that tone. Academic prose isn’t necessarily good or bad writing, but it is very particular in its tone. New media writing, on the other hand, can give us a sense of a different style of writing and thereby help us see the distinct contours of a piece of academic writing. While people worry that the unique demands of Twitter or the text message will undermine writing ability, it seems entirely possible that the experience of writing in multiple registers will actually strengthen writing overall.
NUANCE
Short-form writing is also a great reminder of the importance of doing justice to ambiguity. For instance, I find that Twitter is great for sharing things that I like, but not so good for those things about which I have significant reservations. Without room for caveats, we are left without an easy way to disagree respectfully. Think about your average statement of scholarly reservation: “While I found the decision to highlight X extremely helpful, I was ultimately troubled by the reliance upon traditional categories of Y.” That’s 145 characters, even without actual content. So I don’t share that link; Twitter becomes for me a place to talk about the things I actively like or that I like enough to forego qualification. The limits of social media writing thus confirm one of the great strengths of academic writing: the creation of a space expansive enough to contain both agreement and disagreement
Overall, composing text for new media is instructive for our non-social media writing. By writing things that are more direct or casual or polemical, we are better able to understand how those qualities may or may not operate within our formal academic prose.
WHY NEW MEDIA WRITING IS DIFFERENT
People don't read information on the Web in the same way as they read printed material. Print content allows us to 'control' the reader. We can write from introduction to conclusion and carefully build arguments. We know what they've read previously, and what they're going to read next. We can present information in a logical sequence, supported by peripheral cues.
Web users skim content, they ignore details to read content faster, they even modify ingrained left-right viewing habits in order to drill down more quickly. There have been a lot of usability studies done over the years, the most extensive of which were conducted by Dr Jakob Nielsen, and Stanford University/Poynter Institute. All the reams of information produced by the Sun Microsystems/Jakob Nielsen usability tests, and the Stanford University/Poynter Institute eye tracking studies, boil down to a few basic facts:
Web users generally ignore extraneous graphics.
79% of users scan the page instead of reading word for word, focusing on headlines, summaries and captions.
Web readers are three times more likely than newspaper readers to limit in-depth reading to short paragraphs.
Of those Web users who do read the entire page, most only absorb 75% of the content.
Reasons for this behavior include:
Reading from a computer monitor is 25% slower than reading from print.
Reading from a computer monitor increases eye strain and fatigue.
Web users often scan centre-left-right, instead of left-right.
Dr Nielsen also developed a number of content-oriented conclusions:
Web users are active, not passive. If a quick scan doesn't show them the information they need, they won't spend time searching for it.
The longer the text, the less likely Web users are to read it.
The longer the text, the faster Web users will skim the scannable elements (headlines, summaries, and captions) - if they scan the page at all.
Web users don't believe hype. Any claim needs to be backed up by facts.
WRITING STYLES THAT ARE GENERALLY USED
There are four types of writing tyles that are generally used and seen in new media and traditional media. There are many sub-types of writing which may fall in any of those categories.
1. Expository Writing:
Expository writing is a subject-oriented writing style, in which the main focus of the author is to tell you about a given topic or subject, and leave out his personal opinions. He furnishes you with relevant facts and figures and does not include his opinions. This is one of the most common type of writing styles, which you always see in text books and usually “How – to” articles, in which the author tells you about a given subject, as how to do something.
Key Points:
Expository writing usually explains something in a process
Expository writing is often equipped with facts and figures
Expository writing is usually in a logical order and sequence
2. Descriptive writing:
Descriptive writing is a style of writing which focuses on describing a character, an event or a place in great details. It is sometimes poetic in nature in which the author is specifying the details of the event rather than just the information of that event happened.
Example:
In descriptive writing, the author will not just say: “The vampire killed his lover”
He will change the sentence, focusing on more details and descriptions, like: “The red-eyed, bloody vampire, flushed his rusty teeth into the soft skin of his lover, and ended her life.”
Key Points:
It is often poetic in nature
It describes places, people, events, situations or locations in a highly-detailed manner.
The author visualizes you what he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels.
3. Persuasive Writing:
Persuasive writing, unlike ‘Expository Writing’, contains the opinions, biasness and justification of the author. Persuasive writing is a type of writing which contains justifications and reasons to make someone believe on the point the writer is talking about. Persuasive writing is for persuading and convincing on your point of view. It is often used in complain letters, when you provide reasons and justifications for your complaint; other copywriting texts, T.V commercials, affiliate marketing pitches etc. are all different types of persuasive writing, where author is persuading and convincing you on something he wants you to do and/or believe.
Key Points:
Persuasive writing is equipped with reasons, arguments and justifications
In persuasive writing, the author takes a stand and asks you to believe his point of view.
If often asks for a call or an action from the readers.
4. Narrative Writing:
Narrative writing is a type of writing in which the author places himself as the character and narrates you to the story. Novels, short stories, novellas, poetry, biographies can all fall in the narrative writing style. Simply, narrative writing is an art to describe a story. It answers the question: “What happened then?”
Key Points:
In narrative writing, a person, being a narrative, tells a story or event.
Narrative writing has characters and dialogues in it.
Narrative writing has definite and logical beginnings, intervals and endings.
Narrative writing often has situations like disputes, conflicts, actions, motivational events, problems and their solutions.
NEW MEDIA WRITING VS PRINT WRITING
The first thing to keep in mind is that writing for an online medium is night-and-day different from writing for print. Why? Take a moment to think about the core functionality of a print publication. Once an article is printed and circulated, it becomes a product that may be read by the people who might come across a physical copy of it. That publication is now a finite moment in time; the publication doesn’t live or breathe because it’s in a physical form. Readership is dependent upon when the article is released to ensure the highest amount of readers and whatever happens when it hits the secondary market. Publishers can guess how many people might read your article by their circulation numbers, but there really isn’t a definitive way to track who read it and who didn’t.
On the web, not only can a publisher track how many people have read your article, they can also see how many visits it receives, where the visitors originate from, etc. over a long period of time. For this reason, some consider web-based works to live and breathe online. Articles that you may have written two years ago have the ability to become popular again on the web, simply because of how the web functions. Unlike a print publication, mistakes can also be fixed instantly or articles can be changed, which is why some publications have rushed to produce timely content without having all the facts.
In many cases, writing for print allows you to have more freedom and more flexibility with your writing style because you are writing for a captive audience. When you write for the web, you are trying to capture members of a much larger audience.
Because of how the web functions, when you write an article for the web, search engine optimization (SEO) is a key factor in attracting what are known as “organic” visitors. When applied to writing, SEO refers to a process in which the writer will use specific keywords in a particular order on the page in the hopes that the search engines will “pick up” the article and rank it higher in the search results. If I was writing an article related to alien abductions, for example, I might entitle my post simply as “new media writing vs print media?” A potential visitor would then type in that keyword or phrase into a search engine, find your link, and read the article. This visitor didn’t know about the publication that I was hired to write for nor did they know that I had written the article; they were attracted to my writing based on keywords within it. This type of writing affects your writing style because in many ways it limits creativity and word choice in order to achieve the highest amount of readability possible while retaining the overall theme of the article.
Many, if not all, online content providers know about search engine optimization and how powerful well-created content can help lift a site in the search engine rankings to attract visitors. This content, however, doesn’t come “free,” which is why there is such a huge need for good content written with SEO in mind. SEO is one of the reasons why there are places online that want your writing; many companies are looking for good, keyword-driven articles that they can use on their website. Some of you may feel that SEO isn’t really important all the time; in my experiences, SEO is a component of your online writing toolkit but it isn’t the only one.
In the print world, content is often written with a particular goal in mind, but those goals are often limited by how expensive it is to print that publication and how many people the content might reach. If you think about it, billboards are a great example of how a message needs to be crafted very carefully in order to send the right signal to the right people in a short amount of time. Most print publications also need to generate enough income to cover their base costs, too, which affects how they make decisions.
On the web, content can have the same goals that print publications do. In many cases, ad-supported publications want “eyeballs on the page,” so the writing may be inflammatory in order to attract readers that they can show through their web analytics package to their advertisers. In other scenarios, a business simply wants to have a professional presence online that ranks for specific keywords or they need relevant content on their site because they know that’s how they’ll attract and retain visitors.
STRUCTURE OF NEW MEDIA CONTENT
Content needs to be structured differently for the Web, because the average Web reader scans the first few headings/paragraphs to decide if the content is what they need - and traditional content structure puts the most important information at the bottom of the page.
In general the data presentation (pyramid) format, that is:
Introduction > Details > Conclusion
The Web, on the other hand, needs what's called an 'inverted' pyramid structure:
Conclusion > Explanation > Details
The inverted pyramid structure ensures that readers see the most important information first. This helps readers scan the page and decide if they want to read in-depth and - if they do leave - at least they'll have read the key points.
CONCLUSION
Writing for the new media is a totally different experience from writing for the print media, whether we discuss here essays, press releases, marketing content, technical material, or journalistic articles. The core difference between the media lie in the properties of the media as electronic and dynamic - webbish, vs. static and portable - print on paper.
Naturally, the characteristics of each medium and its limitations impose some rules on the writer, and the designer of text and visual image. Such characteristics also dictate some methods of work, styles, and tools. The two media, online and print, also address the readers, who likewise, live by the standards of the media, in a very different fashion.
The printed format is usually limited by size, and thus, usually contains more text, describing and explaining the theme, with little emphasis on visuals. Whereas a web post, embedded with hyperlinks, allows the writer to compose a concise description, and demonstrate the idea with a strong visual image that can spare thousand words and add a significant impact.
Nonetheless, hyperlinks do not limit the text, as much as they serve as content dividers, or organization utilities. Through using hyperlinks, the text can be better divided into topics, sub topics, and sub sections. The division is thus, modular, and pretty much thematic. The readers are active in selecting the content to read, and they are the ones to decide on the reading order, not the writer. In this way, the presented theme can be more understandable—compared with the printed text that is usually used to convey all the bunch of information in a linear fashion.
One of the most prominent advantages of web writing compared with print writing is the interactivity with the readers that the media imparts. Allowing the readers/users to select options, vote, fill in info, submit content—affects the writing style and the visual presentation a great deal. That said, wherever the readers become involved in the content and the features that the site promotes—the text changes according to their selection, and sometimes also dynamically, during runtime. Such a thing would be impossible using static print.
Writing for the web and for the print requires different tools for handling text and images. The printed medium usually uses desktop editing tools, such as MS Word, and desktop publishing tools such as Freehand, InDesign, and Illustrator or Photoshop for image treatment; while web design can be created with different writing and editing tools (similar to print) or use Photoshop for image treatment-- however with no need to page and layout the text or format it physically on paper, another big plus.
Despite the great added values of new media writing over print writing, print writing is still considered a more "formal/official" choice, and therefore, it is the current standard in “serious” publications of books, scientific articles, academic essays, and legal publications. The printed result/product is permanent, less suspect to changes or amendments, and not less important, portable. Whereas, web text and visuals are more dynamic, changeable, updateable, durable for life, and more and more portable as well, thanks to handheld mobile devices, notebook PCs, PDAs, Tablets, iPhones, i-Pads and the like.
REFERNCES
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