Page 35 - Decoding Culture

28 DECODING CULTURE
inductively inferred using whatever are the currently accepted
observation techniques. To Willer and Willer this is 'pseudo­
science', an unacceptable departure from the canons of proper
inquiry. If so, of course, it has to be conceded that much effects
research is pseudo-scientific. But whatever the force of that claim,
this divorce of processes of empirical generalization from their
theoretical context gives rise to a research practice emphasizing
the goal of establishing direct correlations among variables at the
expense of understanding the social and psychological mecha­
nisms which generate the correlation. In the limiting case this
leads to a behaviourist focus on stimulus-response associations,
and even in less restrictive conceptions it leads to a tendency to
express 'findings' as superficial associative statements. Scientific
knowledge thus becomes no more than an empirically buttressed
assembly of such generalizations.
All this is reinforced by the familiar empiricist tendency to priv­
ilege precision, thus favouring indicators amenable to interval
measurement. The most dramatic instance in effects research was
the growth of content analysis during the tradition's heyday, from
Berelson's (1952) concern with 'objective, systematic and quanti­
tative' content data through developing levels of methodological
sophistication and computerization (Pool, 1959; North et at. , 1963;
Stone et at., 1966; Holsti, 1969; Gerbner et at. , 1969). But, for all this
obvious methodological invention, the processes through which
media meanings were socially constructed remained largely unex­
plored. As it had been in other respects, effects research proved to
be trapped within a somewhat restrictive empiricist epistemology,
only able to envisage the communication process in terms of atom­
ized questions about effects.
Consider, now, the social ontology presumed by this research
tradition. Superficially this is less internally consistent than is its
characteristic epistemology. True, it is broadly individualistic, but

Copyrighted Material