Bremen.
The next speaker at the ECREA 2010 pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is John Downey, whose view is that comparative media methods are not as well developed as those in the social sciences. We might be able to learn from these other fields.
Comparative media analysis has made little progress in recent time in terms of explaining media phenomena; there is a danger of ethnocentricity, and an overemphasis on normative concerns. Data are often difficult to compare across different frames of research, and the appropriate methodological approaches are disputable; case studies, for example, are approached in a relatively unsystematic manner. Comparative approaches often build on a choice of the ‘most similar’ or the ‘most different’ cases.
John advocates fsQCA, 'or ‘fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis’, as an alternative approach: its focus is on explanation; it is critical of statistical approaches; it seems to make the case study approach more rigorous; it can be used for large as well as small samples; its focus is on the calibration rather than a mere measurement of data; and most importantly (and giving the approach its name), it operates on fuzzy rather than crisp sets (values between 0 and 1 rather than simple in/out, on/off binaries).
Using this approach enables researchers to test various hypotheses on a rigorous and systematic basis; other relevant social science approaches may all exist.
