Durable, Portable Research through Partnerships with Interdisciplinary Advocacy Groups, Specific Research Topics, and Larger Data Sets

ABSTRACT

Relying on the case of a mixed-methods study centered on patients’ strategies for establishing their credibility in clinical conversations, this essay argues that the more intentional and effective the participant recruitment and the more specific the inquiry, the more likely technical communication and rhetoric of science researchers are to encounter potentially powerful partners through which they might get and analyze compelling data and, thus, gain engaged audiences outside of their disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Health/medical communication
• qualitative data coding
• research methods
• rhetoric of health and medicine
• rhetoric of science

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lisa Melonçon for her guidance throughout the research process and especially for introducing me to the concept of data saturation in qualitative research.

I am also quite indebted to the peer reviewers and to special issue editors Kirk St. Amant and S. Scott Graham for guidance throughout the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Latour (2000) acknowledges a similar issue in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the context of mainstream sociology, noting that “either they destroy what they study or ignore what it is…. No wonder that STS is rarely read amongst mainstream sociologists”(p. 112).

2. Science and Technology Studies (STS) are among related fields that also have seen an uptick in the use of ontologies. For instance, addressing the recent emphasis on ontology in STS, Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) argued that “rather than implying a commitment to a certain perspective on difference, materiality or politics, our field’s current curiosity about ontologies and their enactment is best understood as a way of extending its idiosyncratic critical sensibility – an appreciation of fluidity in seemingly stable entities, a recognition of difference beyond claims to singularity (and vice versa), a reluctance to take the world at face value – to the realm of the ready-made, to the world of those entities whose being might seem most unproblematic and ordinary” (p. 335).

3. The need to recruit a very specific group of people can lead researchers to “purposive sampling,” as in St. Amant and Melonçon (2016b) in which the authors needed “a very specific group of people” – professional TC practitioners (p. 350).

4. Although I do not have data to support this claim, I have strong anecdotal evidence to suggest its legitimacy.

5. For a recent discussion of data saturation and the need to present “a more thorough re-evaluation of how saturation is conceptualized and operationalized” (p. 1904), see Saunders et al. (2018).

6. An additional way to make TC and RoS research more durable and portable is by tending to other basic research design elements, such as triangulation of data sources as a validity measure and, in quantitative projects, attention to correct statistical usage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cathryn Molloy

Cathryn Molloy is an associate professor in James Madison University’s School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication where she serves as director of undergraduate studies. Her RHM work, which explores issues of rhetorical ethos in health and medical contexts, has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and Qualitative Inquiry.