Researching research

Both journals I chose — JMC Quarterly and Journalism and Mass Communications Educator — are published by the AEJMC. JMCE is more theory and method-intensive, while JMCQ seems to focus on both more practical and more digitally-oriented research. While there is some overlap, JMCE is more specialized with its education focus.



From JMC Quarterly:

Meeks, L. (2008). All the gender that's fit to print: How the media covered Hillary Clinton
        and Sarah Palin in 2008. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 90(3), 520-39.


The author uses content analysis to evaluate the NY Times' coverage of the two most prominent women in the 2008 Presidential race. She found the "Times promulgated stereotypic trends by providing heavy emphasis on women's novelty, and more attention on masculinized content. Furthermore, a time-frame analysis showed that the Times gave men more issue and trait coverage than women as the primary and general election came to an end." Not surprising.




From JMC Educator:

Choo, M. (2013). Exploring determinants of relationship quality between students and their academic
         department: Perceived relationship investment, student empowerment, and student-faculty
         interaction. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, 68(3), 255-268.


This was a qualitative study intended to examine various contributors to student-faculty relationships and concluded that all three components that were studied were factors in perceived relationship quality. I read the study, and the logic and causality weren't terribly strong, almost like this was a meteorologist telling us that some combination of wind, sun, and precipitation would compose tomorrow's weather.

What is science?

Standardization will kill us all. It came to the business world in the 1980s in the form of ISO9001 requirements, with procedure upon procedure designed to document procedures. Now it's coming to a liberal arts institution near you, where every speculative thought will have to undergo rigorous experimentation and review. It seems to me that there is a common-sense notion that the social sciences are as different from the natural sciences as the typical political scientist is from the typical chemist, but apparently there is a significant enough faction of academics that are fiercely protective of the word science.

I love debating the meaning of words. Often a seemingly huge difference in opinion can be boiled down to differing interpretations of a word or phrase. The word "science" comes from the latin scira — "to know." Knowledge, and the method that feeds it, shouldn't be limited to things we can count and measure. I think all of us would on some level agree to this, or we would be in a different building. 

Adding more layers to the process won't help the result, and requiring any study to be run through a car wash of processes before it gets the "100% science" tag is wasteful and potentially a grand annoyance for those of us who want to explore how different WWII peace arrangements might have affected modern Europe. Let's be broad constructionists and go back to the Latin, and let anyone making explorations of the mind call themselves a scientist.