| Summary: |
The publication of this Handbook marks the culmination of several
professional and personal itineraries. The chapters of the volume
suggest that the field of mass communication research has been
undergoing two interrelated developments in recent decades: the rise
of qualitative approaches as methodologies with an explanatory value
in their own right, and the convergence of humanistic and socialscientific
disciplines around this “qualitative turn.†As editors, we offer
the Handbook as a resource for the further development and social
use of qualitative methodologies in different cultural and institutional
contexts.
The personal itineraries have taken one editor from Europe to the
United States, the other from the United States to Europe, and both to
India, where the idea for the Handbook was first conceived during the
1986 meeting of the International Association for Mass
Communication Research. As participants in this conference, we were
reminded repeatedly that while qualitative research represented an
important (and frequently the most inspiring) part of the scholarship
presented at that and similar events, there were as yet hardly any
journals, conference sessions, or handbooks available which could
serve to institutionalize this area of inquiry and to introduce students
and young researchers to its methodologies. The cultural setting of
the 1986 conference also contributed to our awareness that for the
study of communication in its varied social and cultural contexts to
become valid or meaningful, methods of qualitative and “thickâ€
description (Geertz, 1973) are required.
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