CMN 2101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Critical Left, Ethnography, Participant Observation

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Communication
• Course: CMN 2101
• Professor: Mohammed El Hashash

Document Summary

Partially subjective (because researcher is in the gathering process, thus resulting in an rich/soft data (a lot of data to go through, not numeral) inherent bias as opposed to surveys) Critical approach (comes from critical left and believe the world is not objective; there is no absolute truth and the world is too complex to generalize) Purpose is to understand a group or group of people; embed oneself within a culture. Attempt to understand or describe human behaviour within its cultural context research becomes the student and the participants become the teacher i. e. studying the communication behaviour of certain groups; can help communication scholars understand identity. Purpose is to generate theory from the ground up; creation of theories and testing them to generalize findings. Developing a theory as we explore our subjects and collect our data. Similar to ethnography, studying individuals more than cultural groups.