Suchergebnisse

A study to provide Voice of America executive personnel with a description of VOA output to be used as an administrative tool to facilitate its appraisal against criteria of directives and make possible a comparison of output of different language services. Needed were standardized procedures employing categories and unambiguous definitions codeable with a high degree of reliability. Desire for trend studies froze categories and discouraged code revisions which changes in political scene as well as increasing research experience suggested. Time pressures prevented designing new techniques. Since no new discoveries will emerge, no hypotheses were tested, no new formulations achieved, the social scientist is performing skilled bookkeeping, not research. The justification for the undertaking must lie in its usefulness to VOA. Doubts exist that data derived exclusively from manifest content can meaningfully account for communication whose affective content is largely implicit (emphasis upon f counts may be misleading from viewpoint of total communication situation). It is suggested that original purposes should now be reformulated in terms of the total communication situation. R. S. Halnern.