Schrøder, Kim Christian (2016, May). Q-method and news audience research. In Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo, & Alfred Hermida (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital journalism (pp. 528-545, Chap. 35). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. (Print ISBN: 9781473906532, Online ISBN: 9781473957909) (doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957909)
Abstract: The landscapes of news in the digital era are increasingly characterized by technological innovations, which make traditional and innovative forms of journalism available on digital platforms to audiences anywhere anytime. It is nothing new that audiences’ news consumption is strongly cross-media. But with today’s abundance of multi-platform news media it is more urgent than ever to devise methods––qualitative as well as quantitative, and mixtures of these––for mapping the ways in which audiences, routinely as well as by deliberate choice, navigate in, select from, make sense of, and sometimes participate in the news landscape. It is equally urgent to explore, through the phenomenon of media repertories, the ways in which news consumption practices are typologically patterned in ways that correlate, for instance, with socio-demographics, political engagement, and lifestyles. When it comes to concrete methodological tools, it is important to enhance explanatory power by adopting a non-dogmatic, creative mindset that invites sequential as well integrated combinations of qualitative and quantitative approaches. This chapter’s methodological backbone consists of such an integrated research tool, Q methodology, for building audience news media repertoires.
Kim Christian Schrøder <kimsc@ruc.dk> is in the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark.
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