Communication Research Methods 2016: Practices and Challenges

ICA 2016 Preconference, Fukuoka, 9 June 2016

The Communication Research Methods 2016 (CRM16) preconference aims to bring together scholars from all divisions and interest groups who are concerned with research methods and practice. There is currently no division or interest group that is explicitly dedicated to communication research methodology. CRM16 provides a much-needed forum for scholars from all subfields of communication to discuss original scientific research, best practices, and issues in the area of methodology and research practice, both qualitative and quantitative. 

Conference date, venue, and registration

Registration for the preconference is open to both presenters and non-presenters and opens on January 15, 2015. The registration fee is 50 USD. The preconference will take place on Thursday, 9 June 2016, at the Hilton Fukuoka Seahawk (Room Sakura) in Fukuoka, Japan.

Abstracts

The abstracts for the preconference are available here as a PDF.

Preconference program

09:00 to 17:00, Fukuoka Hilton, Sakura

09.00 Registration

09.30 Opening remarks

09.40 - 10.20 Session 1 (Chair: Malte Elson)

Emese Domahidi & Elisabeth Günther: Research Methods in Communication Science: A Systematic Review of Academic Practices in the Past 80 Years

Joseph Hilgard: Meta-analytic Techniques for Detecting and Adjusting for Bias: A Re-Analysis of Anderson et al. (2010)

10.20 - 10.30 Short Break

10.30 - 11.10 Session 2 (Chair: Michael Scharkow)

Nadine Bol, Sanne Kruikemeier, Sophie Boerman, & Jennifer Romano Bergstrom: Communicating with the Eyes: A Review of How Eye Tracking Is Used in Communication Research

Annika Hamachers & Volker Gehrau: Data Gathering Across Communication Research: A Meta-Analytic Review from 2000 to 2012

11.10 - 11.30 Coffee Break

11.30 - 12.10 Session 3 (Chair: Emese Domahidi)

Cornelius Puschmann: Scalable but Redundant? Developing Sensible Applications of Topic Modeling to Media Content

Jelle Boumans, Hajo Boomgarden, & Rens Vliegenthart: A Novel Approach to Assess Content Overlap Between Large Quantities of Texts: Introducing Cosine Similarity in Communication Research

12.10 - 13.10 Lunch Break (Sponsored by the University of Hohenheim)

13.10 - 13.50 Session 4 (Chair: Marko Bachl)

Katsiaryna Stalpouskaya: Extracting Agendas for Action from News Coverage Using Machine Learning Techniques

Kohei Watanabe: Mapping International News: Evaluation of Common Lexicon-Based and new Dictionary-Based Methods for Geographical Classification of News Texts

13.50 - 14.00 Short Break

14.00 - 14.40 Session 5 (Chair: Jens Vogelgesang)

Ariel Hasell & Shannon McGregor: Black-box Algorithms: Scholarly use of Proprietary Coding Software in Communication Research

Helen Sissons: Ethnographic Multimodal Discourse Analysis

14.40 - 14.50 Short Break

14.50 - 15.30 Session 6 (Chair: Frank Mangold)

Bartosz Wilczek: Investigating Causal Mechanisms With Process Tracing in Communication Science: the Example of Journalistic Performance Formation in Converging Newsrooms

Raffael Heiss, Desiree Schmuck, Carolin Eicher, & Jörg Matthes: Citizen Science as a Method of Data Collection: Exploring the Predictors of Participation Among School Students

15.30 - 16.00 Coffee Break

16.00 - 16.45 Roundtable discussion

Participants: Patricia Moy, Mary Beth Oliver, Sri Kalyanaraman, Brian Weeks

16.45 - 17.00 Concluding Remarks & Farewell

Contact

For inquiries regarding this preconference, please contact one of the organizers:

Jens Vogelgesang, University of Hohenheim (j.vogelgesang@uni-hohenheim.de)
Malte Elson, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (malte.elson@rub.de)
Brian Weeks, University of Michigan (beweeks@umich.edu)
Michael Scharkow, University of Hohenheim (michael.scharkow@uni-hohenheim.de)