At this year’s International Communication Association conference in Seattle, David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Matthew Powers and myself are organizing a preconference on the role of qualitative methods in political communication research.
We believe that qualitative methods like ethnographic field work, interviews, and focus groups that have contributed to many other fields of media and communication research (as well as to other social sciences like sociology) but have played a fairly marginal role in political communication research in recent years have much to contribute to our understanding of political communication processes.
The idea behind the conference originates with a piece Dave, Daniel and I presented at ICA 2013 in London calling for “A New Era of Field Research in Political Communication” (the full conference paper here, a shorter, revised version is coming out in Leah Lievrouw’s edited book Challening Communication Research, which collects the best papers from the 2013 London conference).
For the preconference, the three of us behind the paper teamed up with Matthew Powers, who has done very interesting research on NGOs and their PR strategies (see this piece, for example). All of us have done empirical research based in part or in whole on qualitative methods and all see ourselves as at least in part political communication researchers. Together, we wrote and issued a call for papers for a qualitative political communication preconference at the 2014 ICA, with the support and sponsorship of both the journalism studies section and the political communication section.
We’ve had a great response to the call, and on May 22, we’ll have 32 paper presentations in two parallel tracks as well as roundtable discussions and much more (see the program here), presenting empirical findings, discussing methods, and developing theory for understanding political communication in a changing media and communication environment.
Things are picking up speed as we get closer to our May conference–
On the qualitative political communication blog, we have a series of interviews about methods with some of the presenters.
The political communication report, has just published a feature about the preconference.
We expect to soon to be able to announce a publication venue for a special section consisting of the best papers from the conference.
Stay tuned…
UPDATE: The International Journal of Communication (IJoC) will publish a special section based on the conference. Thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. As the premier open-access communication journal and one with a strong commitment to interdisciplinary work and methodological diversity, it is the ideal forum for this.
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