1. Different qualitative research methods create different relationships between researcher and participants.
2. Interactions with participants and observations of their interactions with others are captured as textual data.
3. Field interviewing is an informal or practical qualitative method for discovering how people think and feel about communication practices.
4. Researchers use an interview guide composed mostly of open questions to encourage the respondent to tell his or her own story.
5. Most interviews are audiotaped, transcribed, and verified back to the tape.
6. Guided by a facilitator, a focus group is comprised of 5 to 10 people who respond to the facilitator's question in a group discussion format.
7. Focus groups are a practical method for addressing applied communication problems, and capturing the ideas of difficult-to-reach populations.
8. Focus groups take advantage of the chaining or cascading of conversation among participants.
9. Narratives, or stories, can be collected in interviews, as critical incidents, from questionnaires, from the course of everyday conversation, and in many forms of printed communication.
10. Ethnography is a qualitative research method in which the researcher immerses him- or herself in the communication environment for a long time, often becoming one of the interactants.
11. Autoethnography is autobiographical, reveals the author's emotions, and is often written in first person.
12. Ethnography of communication is a theoretically driven method in which researchers focus on language or speech communities to produce highly detailed analyses of how symbolic practices are expressed in a particular social structure.
13. The advantage of ethnography is that it allows researchers to collect communication in its natural state.
14. Ethnographers rely on extensive field notes, often written outside of the view of participants.
