Page 189 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

178 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

which have been the framework of some recent research in political
communication (Graber 1988, Lau and Sears 1986, Van Dijk 1983).
The schema approach tends to work from the top down, initially
formulating hypotheses concerning general cognitive procedures or
rules which are then applied to individual thinking through
experimental or survey data. One underlying assumption is that
schemata present subjects with hierarchical structures consisting of
information that subjects tap to understand or act on the political world
which they encounter. While not all types of schemata are sequential or
stereotyped scripts (Abelson 1981), the theoretical assumption is that
political cognition follows certain predefined patterns. This theoretical
framework is analogous to the algorithmic model of a computer and
fails to integrate or account for the affective, context-dependent and
interest-driven nature of human understanding (Dreyfus 1979),
particularly in an area such as politics.
In contrast, then, we take as our point of departure the specific
understanding of politics which interviewees voice in an informal,
conversational context, thus moving bottom-up from the data. Both
studies worked from the assumption that political sense-making needs
to be studied in terms which are grounded in the respondents’ own
discourses (Glaser and Strauss 1967). An important aspect of politics is
people’s conceptualization of events and issues about which they are
regularly asked to hold ‘opinions’ and make voting decisions. We
suggest that this is a complex process, which is influenced by
background knowledge and political context as well as by particular
strategies of understanding that may be more or less specific to
individuals, social groups or cultures. Hence, we define theme as a
translating mechanism used by individuals to make sense of public
issues and events to which they are exposed, either through the mass
media, interpersonal communication or direct experience. In discourse-
analytical terms, themes are entailed by (follow from) and sum up the
propositions employed by a respondent to characterize or discuss a
particular political subject matter. Themes derive from various agents
and processes of socialization, including mass communication. Thus,
themes may serve to mediate between the discourse of politics and the
discourses of other social forms of experience.
In establishing themes in the interview transcripts, the two studies
employed different systematic, analytical procedures. While in the
American study two groups of researchers discussed and compared
emergent themes, the Danish study performed a linguistic discourse
analysis of the interview transcripts. Moreover, one characteristic