Strategically Communicating

To celebrate “National News Engagement Day”, I donated to what has steadily become my favorite news source in the past six months: the national and independent daily news program Democracy Now!. After hearing about DN! from a friend, I quickly fell in love with Amy Goodman’s raspy voiced reporting and the generous coverage given to topics I had never seen addressed in the mainstream media.

I began to really get into DN! after they devoted an entire broadcast to an interview with George Takei. Soon I wasn’t just watching the hour-long segment. I even went so far as to pick up books mentioned in my favorite interviews, or research topics that interested me within DN!’s online archives. I felt empowered and informed. There was only one problem. I liked DN! so much, I didn’t watch anything else.

As Shoemaker and Reese point out, the cultural value of individualism in our country has a pervasive effect on not only how we consume media, but also how we perceive the effects of such media on society, as well as the resulting study of those effects.

How then has the value of individualism translated into the consumption of news? If I self-select DN! and patronize only that program, is that the result of larger cultural norms favoring independent thought? And if so, how can we, as a culture, reconcile our need to be independent from the likely negative consequences of a “mirror-me” news consumption habit like my own?

Lindlof and Taylor (2011) went over the nuts and bolts of note taking, writing and researching in qualitative research in Chapter 8. I’m not sure about anyone else in the cohort, but since I have never done an official qualitative research project, I didn’t have a real grasp of the finer points of everything that went into coding, interviewing and note taking. I had, of course, read several qualitative research studies and read in the methods section about how the researcher conducted their study. What really stood out to me was how much of the tone of what subjects said was recorded and thought about. One question I kept thinking that wasn’t addressed was the objectivity of the researcher’s notes (and perhaps coding). For instance, if all of the notes were handed to an uninvolved qualitative researcher, would they come up with the same results or interpretations as the original researcher?

Another question I had related to external validity. It would seem that having a stranger come into your workplace or home to conduct interviews or to observe a subject may entice that subject to give socially desirable answers or to act differently than they normally would. As a researcher, how do you make sure the subjects are giving you legitimate, valid answers to interview questions?

Visual displays provide a multidimensional space to organize data and show connections between different pieces of relevant data. (Verdinelli & Scagnoli 2013)

Creating visual representations is intrinsic to building theories and creating textual meaning. (Clarke, 2005)

While Joel and I will cover this topic in more detail during our presentation tonight, I wanted to briefly touch on it on our course blog. Many of the tools created for visually representing data are created for quantitative data sets (bar graphs, pie charts, etc.). But how do you visually represent qualitative data? What format does the data take in visual form? Is it even important to have “word” data represented in a different form? I would argue, yes. As communicators and writers, it can be easy to get wrapped up in describing our data, but there are many rich opportunities available to enhance our qualitative findings. By visually representing qualitative data, there is a larger opportunity to make connections, visualize relationships, and build theories.

An examination of qualitative data visualizations by Verdinelli and Scagnoli (2013) outlined the following best practices:

1. A visual display should be as uncomplicated as possible.
2. There should be the right balance of important information and minimum detail.
3. Off-topic content or information should be avoided because irrelevant data creates visual noise.

Above all “a visual display should eliminate any barrier to the goal of presenting information in a clear and accessible way but yet seek to be engaging and appealing.”

Like many others in this class, my job involves trying to craft the right questions. The importance of that was never more apparent than at conference that I just helped run in Orlando. Before each conference we gather insight from a number of people who will be attending the event using the interview technique. The interviews help us identify what would be most valuable for the attendees to hear at the conferences. It’s only through those interviews that we can really glean the topics that are the most salient to the group.

When we go onsite, we also have to be prepared with a contingency plan, which usually involves pulling together a panel with several of the executives that have been involved in the planning process. Typically, we never have to use these plans, but in this case we had a last minute speaker cancellation that prompted a race to fill the session with content. We knew attendees wanted to hear about developing critical skills in the industry. We were then able to pull together a panel with three powerhouse female executives about that topic, which had all three of them asking each other questions and throwing questions out to the audience.

Though the session was thrown together at the last minute, having prepped the right way led to the session being one of the most highly rated presentations of the day. It was the perfect convergence of circumstances that wouldn’t have happened without the right questions.