The music industry is fast-pace, with new trends coming and going, so using our interest in the music industry, we decided to look into a study of a music technology that peaked in 2000, the compact disc. We met with Dr. Waleed Rashidi, a California State University, Fullerton professor, to gain insight into how he conducted his survey in the article Young adults’ compact disc usage experiences in 2020. Dr. Rashidi has dedicated his career to researching music, specifically music technologies, which is why he decided to research why young adults still wanted to engage with CDs and whether they would still engage with them in the future.
Before conducting his study, research on CD usage had to be done. It can be difficult to find credible sources that report accurate numbers but Dr. Rashidi found the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) and Billboard to be reliable and accurate sources for reporting data. The RIAA is aligned with many record labels so they have the credibility and trustworthiness of being a long-time establishment. They are also the association that certifies albums when they are sold for gold, diamond, or platinum releases. All of this combined makes these organizations a credible source of information and they report accurately for sales figures, shipment, and when designating awards. He also mentions the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) as another source that measures worldwide sales figures.
Achieving the same level of reliability and validity in the survey is essential to his research, so Dr. Rashidi emphasized the importance of data saturation. He achieved this by having enough of a response sample that represents the population and can be generalizable. The survey was sent to CSUF students, but if it was sent to students in different geographical areas, there may be different results. People in different regions of the country interact differently with the media; people on the West Coast are surrounded by the entertainment industry, but people in different geographical areas may have different ways of interacting and experiencing entertainment. There is also an economic basis. Those with more money can pay for streaming or afford to start a physical collection of vinyl records or albums. In contrast, those with less may not be able to afford such a costly engagement with the artist, like purchasing physical copies of music. “Looking at the country regionally and understanding the economic differences in different regions could be important in understanding why certain responses might differ from area to area,” said Rashidi. General demographics also impact the results because age and ethnicity can affect how people experience and interact with music.
The research includes direct quotes from the open-ended questions asked in the survey. When asked how he narrows down which quotes or information to include in the article, he said that he looks for similarities in the responses. A pattern can be a trend, and then he looks for a theme he can build upon; he pulls a few examples to highlight the similarities between the participants. He is also looking for outliers because he wants to hear about things that weren’t as popular or frequent, so this is an opportunity to find out why they responded differently from the majority. As a researcher, he finds this area interesting because he wants to hear from various perspectives. He selects examples to back up what he originally claimed, points out similarities, and highlights some interesting outliers.
CD sales in the year 2020 were heavily influenced by the bundling practice, which is when an artist puts together a CD with the purchase of other merchandise or a concert ticket to create a higher charting sale for the CDs. Dr. Rashidi has not followed how bundling has continued to affect CD sales. Still, he did make a connection based on some of the open-ended responses he gained from his survey that the K-Pop community has found a way to capitalize on the lost art of CD sales by having exclusive inclusions of trading cards of the band members that fans want access to which leads them to continue to purchase the CDs. This has led to a new study he is currently working on about how K-Pop has influenced the market of physical music sales in the decade of the 2020s. Since Dr. Rashidi’s original study was published, Billboard has changed the rules about how CD sales are calculated. It will be interesting to see how different the numbers come out without the addition of bundling calculated.
The thought process behind deciding which research method to use when conducting a study about the music and entertainment industry was a question we had in mind when going into this interview because we will likely be doing the same research style in the coming weeks. Dr. Rashidi’s insight on the matter guided us to a decision we believe will be fit for our study moving forward as well as his. He explained that using a survey was most effective when reacting to the target audience of college students because it is the most convenient way to gather information, and people will be more willing to participate in the less work they must do. When you send out a survey that is expected to take no more than ten minutes, people are much more willing to interact with it than if you invited them to a thirty-minute interview with no compensation for their participation. “I can get a number of responses that way in a timely fashion and also a good variety,” Rashidi said regarding his decision-making process. After conducting our interview with Waleed Rashidi about how he conducted his research for his study, Young adults’ compact disc usage experiences in 2020, it has given us greater insight on how to move forward as researchers ourselves as well as some insider tips when it comes to how to navigate what is and is not credible information in the music and entertainment industry. The information gained from this interview will allow us to make more informed and strategic decisions when it comes to creating our own research in the music space.
Image from Young Adults’ Compact Disc Usage Experiences in 2020.
By: Jennyfer Lopez Ramirez, Leah Humphrey, Lily Holman, and Sofia Vargas
The dissertation titled “Hidden Power: Journalistic Representations of Mental Health Labels” by Elise Anguizola Assaf analyzes how mental health is portrayed in online newspaper articles, focusing on three major U.S. newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Assaf examines the language and framing methods used in 33 articles published over six months in 2018. Her work explores how media narratives often align with a medical model, emphasizing terms and connotations that reinforce mental health as a biological or medical issue, which may perpetuate stereotypes and marginalized individuals labeled with mental health conditions.
Key findings include:
Dominant Use of Medical Framing: Most articles apply a medical model, often casting mental health in terms of illness, treatment, and pathology, thereby reinforcing stigmatized views.
Power and Source Bias: The majority of articles rely on law enforcement and legal sources for causality and authority, which often leads to depictions of individuals with mental health conditions as potential aggressors.
Overlexicalization and Connotation: The frequent use of formal, medicalized language impacts readers’ perceptions by highlighting mental health conditions in terms of risk or criminality, often neglecting social or recovery-focused narratives.
This study ultimately argues for a more nuanced approach in journalistic practice, where mental health stories incorporate balanced and humanizing language and perspectives, and proposes recommendations for shifting from stigmatizing discourse.
Q1: How do you think the lack of tone indication or context in social media can lead to negative mental health effects?
A: Professor Assaf explained there are two sides of social media in terms of the content that audience members are getting. There is the visual and the text that they are reading. With the visual components, tone can come across more clearly. Whereas things that are written can be difficult for an audience member to understand the tone that is intended. There can be problems that occur such as not knowing if the person is mad or funny, we are not always sure how the message is going to come across to the reader. Social media tends to be much more stagnant, she explains that unlike in a text where we can ask for clarification over social media it is almost a one way communication because there is less fluidity back and forth. This issue can affect mental health because people can let that concern, of not understanding the language they are reading, make them uncomfortable and there is not outlet for them to go back and communicate for clarification.
Q2: How did you ensure the validity and reliability of your data?
A: During the long process of writing her dissertation, she had a committee and a chair which allowed for conversations to review and assist on some of the data she was working on. There were multiple sets of eyes going over the data to make sure her findings were reliable. She also conducted a pilot study along with another peer researcher and they agreed to be eachothers second pair of eyes and review each other’s research. During this pilot study her peer selected a random sample of 10% of the data and analyzed it with the codes. Then they went back together and matched the data to confirm they were both coding the information in the same way to improve reliability. She also made sure her newspaper sources had enough variety to confirm her data. She chose an east cast, west coast and middle america publication to ensure she covered the whole country.
Q3: With a topic as nuanced as mental health, how did you ensure that your personal perspectives didn’t influence the interpretation of your findings?
A: Assaf explained she is very up front with her personal experiences with mental health and it did affect her research to an extent. She explained in qualitative research it is very important to acknowledge your bias and the lens you see and process this information through. In her dissertation there are two pages dedicated to why the topic is important to her which tied into how she will read and process the data. She mentioned in qualitative research it is important to communicate those biases to the reader up front so the readers understand what could impact the analysis within that study.
Q4: What did you find the most challenging in the research process?
A: Professor Assaf shared that the most challenging part of her research process was managing feedback from her committee. She explained that having a committee of three meant navigating multiple opinions and expectations, which could be frustrating and sometimes delayed her progress. However, she acknowledged that their input helped her grow as a researcher and ultimately strengthened her work, despite moments of struggle. She mentioned that the same challenge arose when submitting work to journals and conferences, where reviewer feedback ranged from outright rejection to conditional acceptance with required changes. This ongoing back-and-forth with reviewers had both positive impacts on her research and tested her resilience throughout the process.
Q5: Do you feel like the more you grow as a researcher it’s able to balance out or is this the life as a researcher?
A: Professor Assaf believes that challenges in research—particularly those stemming from reviewer feedback and blind review processes—are an inherent part of a researcher’s life. She shared an example from a study she conducted with her colleague, Doug Swanson, where they had to anonymize his name in citations to meet the requirements of a blind review. Ironically, a reviewer then recommended they cite Doug Swanson’s work, not realizing he was a co-author. This experience highlighted for her how, in research, if one challenge is resolved, another often arises, reflecting the ongoing, sometimes ironic, nature of the process.
Q6: Looking back, is there anything you would’ve done differently in the research process?
A: Professor Assaf reflected that, overall, she feels confident in the strength of her study and doesn’t have significant regrets. She mentioned that, in retrospect, she might have preferred including publications like the LA Times and a Midwest newspaper, in addition to the NY Times, to capture a broader geographical representation. However, she didn’t feel strongly enough about this preference to pursue a follow-up study, as she moved on to other research areas.
The qualitative research done by Professor Assaf focuses on the stigma of negativity in the media. Assaf talks about how direct messages and content are targeted towards an individual, whether from a post or direct messages. She then explains how negative content can directly impact them more when they do not have an outlet to fact-check where information comes from. Journalists also use mental health and framing in their media, this creates different interpretations of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder.
When asked about bias during this research, Assaf stated that “it’s really important to acknowledge your bias” and how it affects you during the process. In her dissertation, she explains why this topic is important and how it impacts her. It is also important to process the lens through which this information is given because that shapes the view of the message to the person reading. By Focusing on the nuances of language, qualitative data really shows the power journalists and reporters have on society.
Professor Assaf’s advice:
Professor Assaf advised choosing a research topic that genuinely interests you, as this can make the long process of research more fulfilling and manageable. She noted that while a semester-long project may only need a few months of dedication, longer-term research can span years with frequent adjustments and revisions. To prevent burnout, she emphasized picking a topic that won’t become burdensome over time. Assaf also recommended thoroughly researching the topic in advance. She reflected on her own experience as a student, explaining that having a wealth of sources not only strengthens a paper but also makes it easier to write, as you won’t struggle to meet page requirements when you have a strong foundation of information.
By Lilly Leal, Katelyn Moreno, Jaime Espinoza-Wolff, and Ivan Hernandez
Profesor Dean Kazoleas Ph.D. – Photo by CSUF Communications Department
We conducted the interview with Dr. Dean Kazoleas, a Public Relations Professor here at California State University Fullerton. We analyzed his work The Impact of Argumentativemess on Resistance to Persuasion. This research wanted to look into the study of argumentativeness and if it influences cognitive responses and attitude change during persuasion. In the study it is hypothesized that argumentative individuals would be more resistant to persuasion and generate more counterarguments in response to persuasive messages. The results showed that argumentative individuals were more resistant to persuasion and produced more counterarguments.
By: Ann Sadek, Nicole Strang, Lauren Rosbottom, & Abigail Chertock
Dr. Zac D. Johnson is an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton. His work is in the Department of Human Communication Studies. After years of experience, he’s in his first semester as the department chair. Dr. Johnson’s primary research pertains to the way students communicate inside and outside of the classroom environment and subsequent effects that follow. His work is featured in many places, including Communication Research Reports, Communication Education, Communication Quarterly, and more. We were pleased to have the opportunity to sit down and discuss his published research, From student-to-student confirmation to students’ self-determination: an integrated peer-centered model of self-determination theory in the classroom.
By: Olivia Morris, Sheyda Ebrahimi, Cyrus Tavakkoly, & Mhaczyne Chu De Castro
November 5, 2024
Q1: What was your time like in Qatar?
So I lived in Qatar for 4 and a half years, got there on New Years Eve in 2010 and left in the middle of 2015 for 4 and a half years. My son was born there. It was a very interesting place to live, I mean it’s hot and dusty; uber conservative but it has a thriving expat community. The money was way better than I’ll ever make in any other academic appointment. You can travel and all that kind of stuff so it was a very cool place to live.
Q2: What made you come to the conclusion that you wanted to conduct research about how people received their news in Qatar?
The real practical reason was that Qatar University had very good funding for conference attendance, only you had to have a paper accepted. So I was trying to figure out a paper to write to get accepted to these various conferences that would be in Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, and these places I wanted to go so I started writing papers. In my main area- Advertising research, that’s not really a very big or popular research in the Khaleeji Region in the middle east and so I was trying to figure out something else to do and I found out that there was this really good data set that was available that nobody was using and I thought, well, i’m going to look into that because it was a really rich resource, that people weren’t using and so, I kinda just thought I would troll it for data and see what I can find.
Q3: What type of sampling method did you use to collect the participants?
So this methodology was the research; the surveys were conducted by a professional survey research group. A research foundation that was funded by and housed at Katri university, which is where I work. So there were these people that had worked for top-notch research companies in the US and then, Europe and had this research background, and so, they got grant money from the Katri foundation, which is a very large and wealthy organization that funds a lot of prosocial things in Qatar, and one of the things they wanted to do is fund what they call omnibus survey of life in Qatar. And I don’t know if any of you have ever heard of the general social survey in the US; it is a really big survey that sociologists have been doing, probably since the 1970s, and so they do this survey or modules of it every year. And over time, they’ve developed this incredible database that can show trends data on how values and attitudes and all kinds of things are changing in US society over a period of time because they keep adding to it and also ask a lot of the same questions from year to year so this survey in Qatar was modeled after the US version of the general social survey.
So if you mention that to Dr. Du, I’m sure Dr du will be well aware of the general social survey. And so, anyway, they had all this funding to do this research, and they surveyed, I believe it was over 2,000 people, about 2100 people on this portion of the survey that I was working on the data on, and these were all done in in-person interviews and using a computer-assisted personal interviewing device, so basically, it’s a data collection device on a tablet that administers the survey. Exactly how they sampled it, I’m not entirely clear. It could be that I knew and I don’t remember it could be that I just never knew because in-person sampling, sampling for in-person surveys, often becomes a function of multiple different techniques. One is called snowball sampling, which is where you get some people and then they refer you to others, and refer you to others. That’s not a real statistically strong method of sampling. Could’ve been convenient sampling; I imagine they did hang out at a lot of coffee shops and restaurants, and they did hang out in the malls and things like that and just invited a lot of people, and then there was probably also some invitation through email, text messaging, phone calls, to get people to agree and then let the interviewees come to their home so it was probably, for something that big, a combination of sampling methods.
Q 3.1: Just a follow-up question, in the pre-test assessment, you ruled out migrant laborers from the analysis. Did it affect the overall results?
Probably not because, first off, to understand who the migrant laborers were, and I don’t know if you are that familiar with the population compositions of countries like Qatar and Dubai, things like that. They have, so Qatar for instance, was a population of about 2 million people when I lived there; only about 15% of the population were Qatari nationals. So national citizens from Qatar. The rest were people that were brought in there to work and then they kind of classified the people who were brought into work into two very broad categories. There were the expatriate workers which I was one of those, but these would be mostly people who were working in kind of professional jobs. Management, a lot of stuff in the energy sector. Medicine, education, those are expat workers. Most of the expat workers were from other Arab countries. In the MENA region, North Africa, around the Mediterranean basin, and things like that where you tend to have pretty high levels of education among the Arab-speaking population, but then there were also plenty of European expat workers and things like that. Those were the two groups that were included in the survey. The migrant workers are largely laborers, and they would be, and I don’t know if you’ve followed this, it was kind of a big controversy during the World Cup, but it’s quite controversial how migrant workers are treated in these countries. There’s a lot of promising higher wages than they actually get delivered, there’s a lot of, they get them into the country and then essentially, confiscate their passports so that they can’t leave. There are a lot of human rights issues there, and the people doing this survey wanted and did a lot of interviewing migrant workers to get their perceptions of life in Qatar. However, on the variables that I was looking at as far as media consumption and things like that, there just wasn’t enough. They weren’t even asked those questions because they didn’t have them; they mostly lived in communal housing and did not read newspapers, had very little access, had no general media, and very little general media consumption. Had they had media consumption and been able to be in the survey, may have been a completely different set of results. But they also would’ve been very reluctant to honestly answer questions.
Q4: When conducting this research, how do you determine the sampling error percentage?
So, technically, every question in a survey has its own sampling error, but we usually report the sampling error broadly based on the sample size. I looked it up right before because I couldn’t remember, but the equation… Have you taken any statistics in your research methods class? Okay, so sampling error is calculated using a z-score, which is a standardized score with a midpoint of zero, and each standard deviation is one, or minus one, two, minus two, etc.
The sampling error is calculated as Z, which is based on your confidence interval, and for most surveys, you want a confidence interval of plus or minus 5%. What that means is that within this confidence interval, if people are rating something on a scale of 1 to 10 and the mean is 7, you’re confident that the true mean is within 5% of 7. That’s what a confidence interval represents. So, you take your confidence interval and multiply it by the standard deviation of the population for the variable you’re considering. The standard deviation of the population is divided by the square root of the sample size, and that gives you a percentage.
Q5: Given the nature of the research, did you find it easier to conduct the research using quantitative or qualitative methods?
I’ve always been a quantitative researcher, that’s how I was raised. And with a data set like this it’s intended for quantitative analysis.
Q6: Could you explain the importance of media framing and agenda setting and how that can influence the public’s opinion?
It’s a theory often used in mass communication context and they’re related. The whole agenda setting framework which started I think in the 19780s McCombs and Shaw had a famous article that kind of started this agenda setting model, but there had been for many many years research into people that were thinking that the media in general and news media in particular had these major effects on what people believed, how they voted, how they thought about things, and the research simply wasn’t supporting it. There just was this idea of these major Grand effects, which kind of grew out of the post WWII framework where sociologists and researchers were really concerned about how somebody like Hitler could come along persuade an entire population of country to believe that a set of people were bad and needed to be removed and needed to be exterminated, right. And researchers were like how can somebody be that powerful through their use of the media and they started thinking that media had these profound effects on people but it isn’t necessarily the media that is having these profound effects. And so the agenda setting model kinda started with the idea that maybe the media don’t tell you so much about what to think, but they are pretty good at informing you or informing you in terms of what you think is important. Not so much what to think, but what to think about. If you were to look at political polling right now leading up to the presidential election and I am not sure exactly the order of the top 5, but the top 5 issues across the broad samples of American voters would be the economy, immigration, climate change is actually in the top 5, democracy itself is in the top 5, and I can’t remember the 5th one but that could be an agenda setting effect, depending on what news media you are most paying attention to, which ones they cover the most could influence you in which order is most important So that’s the idea of agenda setting. Framing then gets into how do they characterize the issues and that’s where you get more into liberal media, is it mainstream media, is it conservative media and they may cover the same topics, but they are going to put a vastly different spin on it depending on the political leanings of the people running these news organizations, but also to an extent of the political leaning of the audiences, and trying to feed them information that is consistent with their world view and all media do that so that’s the relationship between agenda setting and framing.
Q7: What language is the news given in in Qatar?
So in Qatar, I guess it depends on which media vehicle you’re talking about. Most of the newspapers were in Arabic only, and then there were two English-language newspapers. Al Jazeera, which is featured pretty prominently in this article, is headquartered in Doha, Qatar, and is quasi-funded by the Qatari government. Al Jazeera essentially has two networks: an English network and an Arabic network. They have different managing editors. The whole top structure is unified, but they are essentially different news divisions under the same name. So, there are different reporters, camera people, producers, and programs between Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic. Some of the other TV news networks mentioned would be mostly or completely in Arabic, but they come from other countries like Saudi Arabia.
Q8: I think you talked about this a little bit earlier, but based on the research that you conducted in your results what type of surveys would you recommend we use in order to receive the most effective and accurate data?
Meeds: So tell me a little bit more about what you’re doing
Cyrus: Yeah so we wanted to interview students about like where they consume their media and if it shapes their opinion, or we can find that out when we ask them, but we didn’t know the best way to do that, like we could probably go on campus
Olivia: We were also thinking we could do a google survey and send them because we all have different classes and Discord chats we can send them in there but I feel like we would need to have a some sort of incentive for them to do the survey, but i feel like thats a good way to get more people to do it in a different demographic of people if we were to send it out that way instead of going up to everybody on campus and having them answer questions right then and there, would you think that would be a good idea?
Meeds: It very well might be. Are you talking about doing a survey then?
Olivia: Yes making a survey and having them fill it out.
Meeds: Ok so like a quantitative survey you could set it up in qualtrics. You could also go through survey monkey which is pretty cheap, and you can limit it to college students
Olivia: Ok, so narrow it down so it’s not so broad.
Meeds: Right I would have that conversation with Dr. Du, who is more engaged in survey methodologies than I am, most of my research has been behavioral experiments so this whole thing of doing secondary analysis on survey data was a jump in a different direction for me. I’m not a survey researcher. She knows you won’t have a lot of resources and you’re not going to get a huge random sample of respondents.
Olivia: Right and she told us from the beginning that the survey would probably be the easiest for us since one we don’t have a lot of time and two it’s just the easiest way to quickly receive the data that we need so I think she’ll be happy with the survey.
Q9: Why do you think Qatari nationals trust Al Jazeera more than other news channels?
Well, Al Jazeera is kind of the home media. It’s headquartered in Doha. It’s a point of national pride. I mean, Qataris are very proud that Al Jazeera is theirs. And so, they, and I assume they still do, but it is kind of a point of national pride, so it would be natural that they would trust that more so than news sources that were from outside the country. Al Jazeera has been criticized quite a lot for being very pro-Qatar in their editorial stances. As you might expect, but that didn’t necessarily bother the Qataris, so they tended to trust it.
Q10: At the end of the study it was deemed that television was the dominant source for news, looking back from those 10 years how that has changed in both the US and Qatar?
Meeds: the influence of newspapers have a very long and rich heritage in Arab countries even though the models of freedom of the press are quite different than what the US press system was founded on and this was a 2013 paper and I was doing this stuff probably in 2012, which is one of the reasons why I don’t remember it real well, I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night laughs. But even then the influence of newspapers was waning in 2012. The influence of Al Jazeera in particular in television news was very strong but people were starting to consider Facebook as kind of a source of news information, so now Facebook is a bit pase and I’m sure it is in Qatar as well but Twitter was also used quite heavily so I’m sure that if you were to look at it now you would see a lot more reliance on social media for the source of news. I would guess Al Jazeera is still pretty strong in Qatar, but may not be as strong in other Arab countries. One of things about social media that often gets overlooked in it’s role in providing information in developing countries and 3rd world countries is that a lot of people in North Africa, East Africa where there’s a lot of political strife and also a lot of poverty- they may not have access to much traditional media, but they all have phones.
Cyrus: That’s interesting
Meeds: That is a really big link to the outside world and as cheap as phones are, that has made a lot of information available to many many people who maybe didn’t get much information before.
Cyrus: And I did a slight dive into how people- college students specifically, and how they get their news, and most of it has been through social media whether it’s Instagram, or Youtube, a lot of it being third party sources, unlike older generations that use traditional like TV or newspaper and I thought it was pretty interesting how it can shape their perception of world foreign affairs that are going on today
My partner and I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Benikia Kressler. Our interview was about an article she published titled “Learning Our Way through” Critical Professional Development for Social Justice in Teacher Education. During our interview, we not only got to see her results from the study she did involving faculty members. But also, how as an educator in one of the largest universities in the country, she noticed we teach in a culturally, experientially, and ideologically diverse context. And like her colleagues nationwide, they bear witness to the tensions and traumas associated with the current U.S. political climate.
The Society for Communications Research 