The story so far ...

Before I post specific notes of our most recent meeting and next steps, I thought I might use the textual format of the weblog to provide a bit more background for folks new to the Qualitative Studies Group, to remind us all how this group started and how it came around to the idea of engaging in a joint research project. (You all have editing power in this weblog; correct me if any of this seems wrong!)

The lot of us started meeting in Fall 2004 in order to provide a place for students and faculty to talk about diverse but productive practices of doing qualitative research within mass communications. Lew, Hemant, and Greg represented the faculty side with fair regularity; a shifting group of students (depending on schedules) worked through some provocative readings, commented on each other's research proposals, and generally agreed that having a "parallel" (but in no way mutually exclusive) forum for research discussion to the existing, more formalized MCRC was a good thing.

But starting with this semester's meetings the group decided that working on a joint research project was really the best way to wrestle with qualitative methods, and the idea of a long-term effort to create a "media map of Madison" began to gel. One aspect of this mapping would use network analysis techniques and data pioneered by Lew's group -- listings of media-saavy organizations within the city informed by a sense of organizational power to create a networked map of coalitions, communication paths, and "influence". Another aspect of this mapping would enumerate media vehicles, editors, reporters, and "beats" in the city (especially alternative media) to provide a groundwork for rapid collection of journalistic views of Madison for further content analysis. A third aspect might literally map the population and political-economic landscape of the city using traditional GIS data, getting a sense of market segmentation and media targets. And finally a fourth slice would think through ways of performing close ethnographic analysis of social groups, neighborhoods, and families within Madison's lifeworld, in order to understand how organizational environments, media environments, and demographic environments both constrain and enable individual social action and civic engagement. This kind of project would take hours and months and years to flesh out, if indeed it could ever be said to be complete. It was ambitious but it was exciting. It was for those reasons also potentially sustainable over the long term.

Two weeks ago we met to think through what kind of topic we'd like to pursue as we construct our Madison media map. We came up with a bunch of possible ideas -- school redistricting, choice of location for a new swimming pool, efforts to attract neighborhood grocery stores, and questions over the risks and benefits of urban sprawl. These are all potentially productive topics, but we agreed that with such a small group it would be better to hone in on only one at a time. What criteria could we use to decide? Folks felt that a productive research topic for the group should, ideally:

• Have concrete spatial areas and borders (eg. neighborhoods, census tracts, school attendance districts) - for geographic and geodemographic analysis
• Have concrete demographic elements (income, race/ethnicity, family status) - for market segmentation analysis
• Have some representation in the mainstream media (for content analysis, interviews with editors/reporters)
• Have some representation in minority/alternative media (for content analysis, interviews with editors/reporters)
• Have some link to civic society organizations (for network analysis, interviews with organizational actors)
• Have some link to "grassroots" individuals (for individual-level aggregate and ethnographic analysis)
• Have some way of “jumping scale” to wider areas of concern (state/national policy)
• Have a historical element for archival/documentary/retrospective interview analysis

Finally, anything we do, we agreed, should be done with an eye to eventual publication (individually and jointly) and so had to have those elusive qualities of "relevance" that conference, journal, and book editors crave. C'est la guerre.

We agreed that we'd all come back in two weeks, and that those interested in proposing a topic and fighting for it would try to convince us that their topic best met those criteria while still remaining both interesting and feasible.

To make a long story short, we picked the current Madison school construction/closing/redistricting issue, as a smaller part of the larger, longer term topic of how a mid-sized midwestern city with a particular (and changing) population, economic, and environmental base, and having a long history of exemplary public schooling, maintains its educational standards and reproduces its educational ideals (and assent to the costs of those ideals) through media representation, organizational action, and civic engagement of individuals. For more details on this, see the Cap Times / WSJ articles on "school boundary changes" and visit the actual plans offered by the Madison Metropolitan School District site.

Now for the specfics ...