Communication

Responding to the newly-emerging trend of organisations hiring journalists to create content on their behalf, Brand Journalism is the first comprehensive, practical guide to this hybrid form of traditional journalism, marketing and public relations. This textbook takes a direct and practical approach to the subject, showing journalists and journalism students how they can apply their skills to working for a brand, and showing those who work for non-media organisations how their organisation can acquire the skills necessary to become a multimedia publisher. Areas covered include: * Establishing the audience your brand wants to engage with * Identifying your organisation's business goals * Developing a brand journalism strategy to help deliver those business goals * Measuring the results of your brand journalism strategy The book also features a wealth of case studies on the subject and offers an invaluable companion website - www.brand-journalism.co.uk.

'Creating Autoethnographies' is an introduction to autoethnography, a form of autobiographical personal narrative that explores the writer's experience of life. The first ever practical text on this increasingly popular research method, it provides a background and considers some of the criticisms of the approach. It is suitable for all social science students, both graduate and upper level undergraduate.

The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practiceprovides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a "behind the scenes" look at the social lives of data sets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, start-ups, civil society organizations and beyond.

Including coverage of the selection of cases, observation and interviewing, recording data, and takes into account ethical issues, Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research introduces the reader to the practice of producing data through ethnographic fieldwork and observational research.

In this comprehensive yet highly compact introduction, Karen O'Reilly introduces the reader to the technical, practical and philosophical issues that arise when employing traditional and innovative research methods in relation to human agents.

In recent years there has been an increasing demand for research evaluation within universities and other research-based organisations. In parallel, there has been an increasing recognition that traditional citation-based indicators are not able to reflect the societal impacts of research and are slow to appear. This has led to the creation of new indicators for different types of research impact as well as timelier indicators, mainly derived from the Web. These indicators have been called altmetrics, webometrics or just web metrics. This book describes and evaluates a range of web indicators for aspects of societal or scholarly impact, discusses the theory and practice of using and evaluating web indicators for research assessment and outlines practical strategies for obtaining many web indicators. In addition to describing impact indicators for traditional scholarly outputs, such as journal articles and monographs, it also covers indicators for videos, datasets, software and other non-standard scholarly outputs. The book describes strategies to analyse web indicators for individual publications as well as to compare the impacts of groups of publications. The practical part of the book includes descriptions of how to use the free software Webometric Analyst to gather and analyse web data. This book is written for information science undergraduate and Master's students that are learning about alternative indicators or scientometrics as well as Ph.D. students and other researchers and practitioners using indicators to help assess research impact or to study scholarly communication.

This unique multi-volume reference set offers readers an all-encompassing education in the ways of social science researchers. Written to be accessible to general readers, entries do not require any advanced knowledge or experience to understand the purposes and basic principles of any of the methods. The Encyclopedia features two major types of entries: definitions, consisting of a paragraph or two, which provide a quick explanation of a methodological term; and topical treatments or essays, discussing the nature, history, application/example and implication of using a certain method. Also included are suggested readings and references for future study. To help provide a more complete explanation than is often achieved within the scope of a single article, key terms and concepts appear in small capital letters to refer readers to related terms explained elsewhere. In addition to epistemological issues that influence the nature of research questions and assumptions, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods tackles topics not normally viewed as part of social science research methodology, from philosophical issues such as poststructuralism to advanced statistical techniques. In covering the full range of qualitative and quantitative data analyses, this key reference offers an integrated approach that allows the reader to choose the most appropriate and robust techniques to apply to each situation. Many entries treat traditional topics in a novel way, stimulating both interest and new perspectives.

Lecturers/instructors only - request a free digital inspection copy hereThis straightforward, jargon-free book provides an invaluable introduction to planning and conducting qualitative data analysis with NVivo. Written by leading authorities, with over 40 years combined experience in computer-assisted analysis of qualitative and mixed-mode data, the new edition of this best selling textbook is an ideal mix of practical instruction, methodology and real world examples. Practical, clear and focused the book effectively shows how NVivo software can accommodate and assist analysis across a wide range of research questions, data types, perspectives and methodologies. It sets out: The power and flexibility of the NVivo software How best to use NVivo at each stage in your research project Examples from the authors′ own research and the sample data that accompanies the software, supplemented with vignettes drawn from across the social sciences Annotated screen shots A website with links to data, sample projects, supplementary/updated instructions, and SAGE journal content This second edition contains new chapters on handling a literature review, visualizing data, working in mixed methods and social media datasets, and approaching NVivo as a team. An insightful step-by-step guide to the messy reality of doing computer-assisted analysis, this successful book is essential reading for anyone considering using NVivo software.

Written in a clear, readable style with a wide range of explanations and examples, this must-have dictionary reflects recent changes in the fields of statistics and methodology. Packed with new definitions, terms, and graphics, this invaluable resource is an ideal reference for researchers and professionals in the field and provides everything students need to read and understand a research report, including elementary terms, concepts, methodology, and design definitions, as well as concepts from qualitative research methods and terms from theory and philosophy.

The second, thoroughly revised and expanded, edition of The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods presents a wide-ranging exploration and overview of the field today. As in its first edition, the Handbook does not aim to present a consistent view or voice, but rather to exemplify diversity and contradictions in perspectives and techniques. The selection of chapters from the first edition have been fully updated to reflect current developments. New chapters to the second edition cover key topics including picture-sorting techniques, creative methods using artefacts, visual framing analysis, therapeutic uses of images, and various emerging digital technologies and online practices. At the core of all contributions are theoretical and methodological debates about the meanings and study of the visual, presented in vibrant accounts of research design, analytical techniques, fieldwork encounters and data presentation. This handbook presents a unique survey of the discipline that will be essential reading for scholars and students across the social and behavioural sciences, arts and humanities, and far beyond these disciplinary boundaries.

Communication research is evolving and changing in a world of online journals, open-access, and new ways of obtaining data and conducting experiments via the Internet.  Although there are generic encyclopedias describing basic social science research methodologies in general, until now there has been no comprehensive A-to-Z reference work exploring methods specific to communication and media studies.

`This book is highly recommended for libraries and departments to adopt. If I had to teach a statistics class for sociology students this would be a book I would surely choose. The book achieves two very important goals: it teaches students a software package and trains them in the statistical analysis of sociological data′ - Journal of Applied Statistics This fully revised, expanded and updated Second Edition of the best-selling textbook by Jane Fielding and Nigel Gilbert provides a comprehensive yet accessible guide to quantitative data analysis. Designed to help take the fear out of the use of numbers in social research, this textbook introduces students to statistics as a powerful means of revealing patterns in human behaviour. The textbook covers everything typically included in an introductory course on social statistics for students in the social sciences and the authors have taken the opportunity of this Second Edition to bring the data sources as current as possible.

For designers, writing and research skills are more necessary than ever before, from the basic business compositions to critical writing. In this competitive climate, designers are routinely called upon to make words about the images and designs they create for clients. Writing about design is not just "trade" writing, but should be accessible to everyone with an interest in design. This book is a complete, introductory guide to various forms of research and writing in design--and how they explain visuals and can be visualized. These pages address communication on various levels and to all audiences: - Designers to Designers - Designers to Clients - Designers to the Design-literate - Designers to the Design-agnostic Being able to express the issues and concerns of the design practice demands facts, data, and research. With Writing and Research for Graphic Designers, you'll learn how to turn information into a valuable asset-- one of the key talents of the design researcher.

The internet is a compelling tool for research, enabling efficient, cost-effective data collection and facilitating access to large samples and new populations. This book presents a state-of-the-art guide to the internet as a tool for conducting research in the social and behavioural sciences using qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. New to this edition: Fully re-written to reflect the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies Expanded coverage of web surveys for data collection Unobtrusive methods to harvest data from online archives and documents New practical tools and resources, where to find them, and how to keep up-to-date with new developments as they emerge New chapter on research ethics and discussion of ethical practicalities throughout Guiding the reader through the theoretical, ethical and practical issues of using the internet in research, this is an essential resource for researchers wishing to assess how the latest techniques, tools and methods in internet-mediated research may support and expand research in their own field.