Department of Communication

Courses in English, Spring Term 2007-2008

Workshop on qualitative methods in Communication Science: Interviews as a means of discovering motives and self images of commentary posters, 5 credits

Lecturer: Nina Springer, Erasmus Lecturer, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München.
Dates: 11.3.- 01.4.2008
Days/Times: Intensive Workshop, Days as below, times 10-12hrs, except on Tuesday 1. April 10-14hrs.

Week 11
Tuesday 11 March
Wednesday 12 March
Thursday 13 March
Friday 14 March

Week 12
Monday 17 March
Tuesday 18 March
Wednesday 19 March
Thursday 20 March

Week 13
Self Study period, no classroom meetings

Week 14
Tuesday 1. April  10-14hrs. Seminar (Student presentations)

Locations: Main Building (Fabianinkatu 33, 3rd floor) Seminar room 9.

! This course can be registered under the study unit S14 (course code 770047). Master students of the Department of Communication need to negotiate with lecturer Ritva Levo-Henriksson if they want to register this course as a part of S15 (course code 770048).

Preregistration in Weboodi is required! 20 students will be accepted to the course in the order of registration.

Course Description:

Methods of empirical social research can be differentiated in quantitative and qualitative approaches. While quantitative oriented research aims to transfer “observed reality” into numerical data to make it accessible for statistical computation, the qualitative approaches try to interprete and describe a complexe phenomenon in its complete spectrum. Furthermore, qualitative methods are often used in cases of relatively unknown research fields to explore and generate hypotheses.

There is a relatively new phenomenon of big online newspapers providing a commentary function underneath their articles to give the audience the possibility to publish their opinions (cf. www.hs.fi, www.usatoday.com, www.sueddeutsche.de). This is a global phenomenon, and the frequency of daily published comments seems to prove that the readers appreciate this new possibility of being interactive. The phenomenon has so far received only little attention of researchers, although it raises questions like: Why do the publishers allow their readers to comment news coverage? Why do the readers want to do that, and, in which way and to what extend do these posts influence what journalists think and write? Will we have to revise the traditional theoretical models of mass communication in future in order to recognise a stronger role of feedback?
In this workshop, we will learn the basic principles of the interview as a method of qualitative research and apply it on the field explained above. As it is a relatively unknown area, qualitative interviewing will fit the purpose best. Further, the students are asked to conduct interviews as well as analyse and interprete them within a research report. The workshop will take place in March 2008.

Mode of assessment:

Assessment scale: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5