Qualitative Research in Journalism

Abstract

Qualitative Research in Journalism. Sharon Hartin Iorio, ed. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 238 pp. $27.50 pbk. An unforeseen but welcome consequence of the public journalism movement has been a renewed interest in how journalists study their local communities. The movement's attempts to widen and deepen public dialogue have inspired reporters to get beyond their traditional dependence on the interview, morgue, and public document and to develop expertise in small group research, social surveys, and modes of public deliberation. The theory underwriting these changes has been at least three decades in the making. Public journalism advocates, though they too rarely note it, have built on the findings of sociologists such as Herbert Gans, Gaye Tuchman, Stuart Hall, and Richard Ericson, who have critiqued the rituals by which news affirms its social and political authority. Dozens of newsroom ethnographers have now documented journalists' persistent tendency to fall back on a handful of storytelling conventions, reach too quickly for a small number of well-worn source cards in the Rolodex, arrange opponents' quotes in a delicately choreographed narrative pas de deux (and call it objectivity), and limply offer accuracy as a defensible substitute for the truth. Sharon Iorio's edited book of essays, Qualitative Research in Journalism, implicitly continues this valuable tradition of critique, and that is the book's distinctive strength, Iorio and her contributors recognize that journalists have approached research too haphazardly and that journalism educators, for their part, have neither theorized the profession's research methods in much depth nor taught them with much effect. As the chapters in this book attest, research is now receiving more attention, within both the profession and the university. The contributors include established scholars such as Clifford Christians and Lewis Friedland as well as experienced public journalism hands such as Jan Schaffer. But most of the chapters are written by respected younger scholars, some of them with significant professional experience. As editor, Iorio, an associate professor in the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University, brings to the book her experience as newspaper journalist, educator, and public journalism research consultant for Knight-Ridder and the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle. What the contributors share, Iorio writes, is a hope that news coverage can be expanded and enhanced through the use of qualitative methods developed in the social sciences. The book includes three theoretical chapters on. the philosophy, history, and ethics of qualitative research, seven chapters on specific research methods such as case studies, focus groups, interviews, oral history, ethnography, civic mapping, and textual analysis, and chapters on the need for both science and storytelling in journalism and on the value of academic/professional research partnerships. …

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