CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Litty, J. M. (2003, May). Making sense of media production: Put your method where your methodology is. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Diego, CA.
© Jamie M. Litty (2003).

The “interpretive” paradigm in the social and hermeneutic sciences (having emerged from phenomenological, post-structural, and postmodern epistemologies):

IS CHARACTERIZED BY:

• De-privileging of the researcher position
• Acknowledgment of people’s social situatedness/multiple subject positions
• Ontological uncertainty and discontinuity
• Knowledge/reality as a discursive outcome

ON MEANING/MEDIA QUESTIONS IN PARTICULAR:

• Polysemic texts
• Active audiences bridging gaps, filling vacancies, making connections
• Text/audience a dialectical encounter
• In a particular time-space but also in historical context

IN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS:

• Studying mundane practices and perspectives of individuals
• Highlighting situational and/or biographical concerns

In order to “practice what you preach,” epistemologically and ontologically (in order to realize your underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions), what should an interpretive research method be like?

RESEARCH METHOD:

• Individual experience (and “local” knowledge) as appropriate level of analysis
• Privilege respondents/informants as “theorists” of their own experiences
• Reveal both Structure and Agency (patterns & flux; hegemony & resistance; outer & inner forces)
• Investigate how meaning is made as much as (if not more than) which meaning was made

Researchers who want to study media production (encoding, not decoding) through/in this sort of grounded, qualitative methodology, can look to Sense-Making—for its underlying assumptions, its data collection method, and its data analysis template.

OPERATIONALIZING SENSE-MAKING:
In Data Collection (example):

Micro-Moment or Macro-Moment Timeline Interview
Anchors the respondent in actual prior experiences rather than hypothetical examples or generic attitudes. In the case of media production, this would reconstruct (in talk) the process of creating a piece of media—probing what happened at particular stages of production and along with that, any thoughts, ideas, memories at stages; questions, concerns, confusions at stages; emotional, physical, other reactions; how all of those relate to the respondent’s life or not; helps and hindrances; self-critique; institutional critique.

In a study of public radio feature production, the underlying movement was:

In Data Analysis (example):

Sense-Making Metaphor

A generic deductive template with inductive open-mindedness; can be used as a kind of coding system for analyzing experience. The researcher identifies the respondent’s perception of the Situation, Gap(s), Bridge, and Outcome. These categories are empty of particular content and are theoretically mandated.

“Outcome” is used loosely here to refer to a number of acceptable concepts in Sense-Making. The outcome of a sense-making experience may be the Use to which information was put; the Hurt suffered by a person; a person’s ideas about how she was Helped by using a particular communication procedure; a new Gap that arises; etc., depending on the research question.

In a study of public radio feature production, a reporter (“Cassie”) makes sense of a news story:

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistlitty.html