The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies:

• The CCCS was established at the University of Birmingham in 1964

• Associated to the CCCS:  Dorothy Hobson, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, Janice Winship, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie, Richard Hoggart, Richard Johnson, Stuart Hall

• Richard Hoggart was its first director; knowing the directors of subjects is important to trace the origins

• The CCCS confined itself to postgraduate research for most of its history

• It only began offering undergraduate degree programmes in cultural studies towards the end of the 1980s

• The media was defined as a major cultural and ideological force standing in a dominant position with respect to the way in which social relations and political problems were defined and the production and transformations of popular ideologies in the audience addressed

• Stuart hall is a super important name to remember when talking about birmingham

• Stuart Hall’s replacement of Richard Hoggart as director influenced this shift of emphasis; Other kinds of work also prospered

• Histories of ‘everyday life’ drew on Thompson’s work but also appropriated ethnographic approaches from sociology and anthropology

• Stuart Hall's famous ‘Encoding/Decoding' paper was a significant early example of the CCCS work (Hall [1973] 1980)

• The encoding/decoding model on which David Morley's hallmark Nationwide study in 1980 was based rejected the textual determinism

• The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. David Morley (1980)

• Tests the encoding/decoding model which claims that viewers take up one of three positions (the dominant position, a negotiated view or an oppositional view)

• This can be understood as their relative distance from the preferred meaning encoded in the text

• Their distance from the preferred meaning is supposed to be determined by their social class position

• The study was based on interviews with 29 groups (of 5-10 people)

• They were comprised of schoolchildren, students (part-time and full-time in further and higher education), full and part-time trade union officials and managers from banking institutions

• The groups were shown a Nationwide programme which was discussed (and tape-recorded) for approximately 30 minutes

• The essence of Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding essay is that television comes to have meaning at different moments as part of the production (or encoding) and as part of the moment of reception (or decoding)

• ​​Encoding and decoding are related but never identical

• Hall goes on to distinguish three hypothetical viewer positions:

• (i) a dominant-hegemonic position, where the viewer decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded and thus follows the text's ‘preferred reading'

• (ii) a negotiated position, which contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements and in which the viewer does not straightforwardly accept the text's ‘preferred reading'

• (iii) an oppositional position in which the viewer strongly resists or outrightly rejects the `preferred reading'

• Morley's Nationwide study made clear that making a television text meaningful is actually more complex than is suggested by the encoding/decoding model and its three viewer positions

• Morley found that groups that had the same class position (Hall's relations of production) gave dissimilar interpretations

Contributions:

• The encoding/decoding model still provides theoretical ground for the basic premise of ‘reception analysis’

• This is a term by which media ethnographies are often referred to which is that viewers are seen as active meaning producers

• Their ‘readings' are the product of their social experiences and class position, and the range of cultural knowledge they have access to

• The encoded ‘preferred meaning' of a text constrains possible readings but never totally controls them

• The ‘boom' in media ethnography occurred a little later, in the early 80s, at least partly inspired by CCCS work that was not itself focused on the media

• The parameters of qualitative empirical audience study were set in this period:

• Contrary to earlier CCCS research and to critical mass communication research in general, gender came to occupy a place as important if not more important than the place of social class

• The parameters of qualitative empirical audience study were set in this period:

• There was a strong focus on popular culture rather than on, for example, avant-garde film (High Culture)

• The parameters of qualitative empirical audience study were set in this period:

• The social context of media use was seen as very important; whereas the properties of the media text itself were given less attention than in text-focused forms of analysis

• Ethnography was an accepted method to study everyday practices and everyday meaning production

Qualitative & Quantitative Research Methodologies

Qualitative & Quantitative Research Methodologies:

• The early form of research originated in the natural sciences and was concerned with investigating things which we could observe and measure in some way

• Such observations and measurements can be made objectively and repeated by other researchers; This process is referred to as “quantitative research”

• Later, along came the researchers working in the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology

• They were interested in studying human behavior and the social world inhabited by human beings

• They found increasing difficulty in trying to explain human behavior in simply measurable terms

• Measurements tell us how often or how many people behave in a certain way but they do not adequately answer the question “why?”

• Research which attempts to increase our understanding of why things are the way they are in our social world and why people act the way they do is called “qualitative research”

• Quantitative research is described by the term ‘positivism’; It derives from the scientific method used in the physical sciences; This research approach is an objective, formal systematic process in which numerical data findings

Qualitative & Quantitative Research Methodologies:

• It describes, tests, and examines cause and effect relationships using a deductive process of knowledge attainment

• Whereas quantitative methodologies test theory deductively from existing knowledge

• The aim of qualitative research is to describe certain aspects of a phenomenon, with a view to explaining the subject if study

• Its origins are in the disciplines of history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and psychology

• This historical foundation, which is not that of the physical science domain, has been cited as one of the great weaknesses of qualitative research

• Qualitative research differs from quantitative approaches…there is no explicit intention to count or quantify the findings

• A qualitative approach is used as a vehicle for studying the empirical world from the perspective of the subject, not the researcher

• The quantitative methods have provided ‘hard’ data while qualitative approaches produced ‘soft’ data

• One can argue that the use of the labels hard and soft data suggests in itself that analysis by numbers is of a superior quality to analysis by words

• Quantitative research demands random selection of the sample from the study population and the random assignment of the sample to the various study groups

• Statistical sampling relies on the study sample to develop general laws which can be generalized to the larger population

• Qualitative research, because of the in-depth nature of studies and the analysis of the data required, usually relates to a small, selective sample

• In quantitative research, the investigators maintain a detached, objective view in order to understand the facts

• The use of some methods may require no direct contact with subjects at all, as in postal questionnaire surveys

• The reason for the detachment is guarding against biasing the study and ensuring objectivity

• In qualitative studies, closeness between the researcher and participants is encouraged

• The strength of such an interactive relationship is that the researcher obtains first-hand experience providing valuable meaningful data

Quantitative Research:

• Quantitative research is the process of collecting and analyzing numerical data to explain a phenomenon

• Quantitative research is also known as traditional, positivist, experimental and empirical research

• Quantitative data is mainly presented as numbers and relies heavily on statistical analysis; The nature of quantitative research is ‘objective’ ; The phenomenon under the study is independent of researcher's thoughts

• The argument for quantitative research is that in some, occasions, numbers can provide more reliable information than words

• Sampling: quantitative research methods are based on large randomized sample number, statistical inference and few interpretations

• Quantitative research design: can be either descriptive or experimental

• Strengths of Quantitative Research:

• Quantitative research findings can be generalized to a large population as the data is based on random sample selection

• Quantitative research findings are based on precise and quantitative data and hence, are accurate and reliable

• Strengths of Quantitative Research

• Quantitative research finding can be used to make quantitative predictions

• Quantitative research can be used to analyze large quantity of data

• Quantitative research is useful to study a large population

• Quantitative researcher is independent and the research is objective

• Quantitative data collection is relatively quick

• Quantitative data analysis is not complicated, data is verifiable and the statistical software make the analysis relatively quick

• Limitations of Quantitative Research:

• Quantitative research on human phenomena factors such as motivation and perception can provide limited results

• Quantitative research requires the knowledge of statistics and statistical softwares; Quantitative research requires more time to analyze as the sample size is large

Qualitative Research:

• Albert Einstein - “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”

• Qualitative research can be defined as the process of collecting and analyzing textual data to get an insight of the interpretations conveyed by people about a phenomenon which cannot be possible with quantitative research

• Qualitative research is mainly used to understand human behaviour factors

• Qualitative research is subjective and the aim of qualitative research is to understand a social phenomenon

• Qualitative research is also known as constructivist, interpretive, postmodern

• Qualitative data is presented as words, sounds and images; The sample for qualitative method is relatively small

• Data collection requires interaction between the researcher and the research participants

• The nature of data in qualitative method is textual, very detailed and information rich

• The main methods of collecting qualitative data are interviews, focus group and observation; The approaches of qualitative data analysis are thematic analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and others

Strengths of Qualitative Research:

• Qualitative research provides complex textual descriptions of how people experience a phenomenon

• Qualitative research can be used to explore culturally defined experience

• Qualitative research provides a depth understanding of a complex phenomenon

• Qualitative research is useful to study a case

• Qualitative research provides an insight into people's behavior, perception and experience

• Qualitative research data is generally small, convenience and cost effective to collect

Limitations of Qualitative Research:

• Qualitative research analysis is based on the meanings conveyed by the participants and the researchers which might not be generalized to a large population due to the lack of statistical testing

• Qualitative research sample is small and is not selected at random which cannot be true representative of the population

• Qualitative research findings cannot be used to make quantitative predictions

• Qualitative research cannot be used to test hypothesis

• Qualitative research findings might have low credibility

• Qualitative research data collection is complex

• Qualitative research data analysis can be time consuming

• Qualitative researchers do not follow a common procedure to analyse qualitative data

• Qualitative researcher can influence the results

• Qualitative research findings reliability and the validity depend on researchers’ skills and experience

Mixed Research:

• A mixed method research is the type of research in which a researcher or team of researchers combines elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches

• Mixed research is a novel and a vibrant research methodology which is getting momentum as the third choice of research methodology

• Advantages of Mixed Research; Mixed research provides insight which could not be offered by a mono-method

• Mixed research can enhance the validity of results, theory building, hypothesis testing and generalizations

• Mixed research provides a more complete picture of a research

• Mixed research results are less biased; Mixed research facilitates different dimensions of thinking for the researcher

• Mixed research provides the opportunity for presenting a greater range of different views

• Mixed research provides better/stronger conclusions

• Mixed research provides the opportunity for a novice researcher to capitalise on the experience of both methods

• Mixed research requires the knowledge of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies

• Mixed research is time consuming and may cost higher than a mono-research