To answer your question, my coding work started with four messages selected at random from the overall 650-plus corpus of emails. In the two-stage coding process, the first coding cycle began with a read-through of each message and finding sentences, phrases, and messages with language about things such as greetings, timeframe, course modality, emergency planning, to name a few. I let the concepts emerge from the messages, and noted them as they came up, taking an open coding approach.
The overall codes which emerged in the first round were broad, since the open coding let the codes emerge from the text. But, some of preliminary ideas that were coming up in the first round included emergency planning, affirmative content, time, community, and infection control, in addition to the demographic codes (such as institution name, sender, and date sent).
I would be happy to share more about these codes if you’d like. There’s a wide range in the first round!
I would be interested. I always find different researchers’ coding approach unique, yet must be able to be replicated. Did you develop a coding scheme? It might be something to think about that could come out of your research.
Hi Jessica, happy to elaborate more! Thanks for coming back, too. I do have a coding scheme, yes. My coding scheme came about as I looked at each sentence of an email and looked for words that might characterize the sentence, or theme of the sentence. These words and themes became the codes for the scheme. In developing the coding scheme, I wanted to have a scheme to replicate with future messages and research, but also to answer the questions I posed for this project.
To draw from one example from my work: knowing I wanted to answer questions about building community, I encountered a sentence from a March 2020 email that said “The last two weeks have been unlike anything that we have collectively experienced.” This sentence has concepts of “we,” “collective,” and “experience” and coded as “Collective Experience” (or CoEx, in shorthand). The code CoEx was then added to my coding scheme for later use.
Emily, this work is fascinating! I am wondering if the themes that you noticed here connected with any neoliberal or late-stage capitalist notions? As we note how postsecondary educational institutions have become increasingly focused on profit mechanisms (thanks to shifting norms surrounding higher education, as well as slashed state budgets), it could be relevant to consider the similarities between universities’ messages and those of for-profit corporations (thinking of all of the “our commitment to our customers” and “keeping our team safe!” messages that I got from companies in the second week of March 2020).
Hi Allegra, thank you! Something I did think of while putting together this poster, and as I continue to watch these emails come in as the pandemic advances, changes, etc, is the idea of motive: what is the motivation of the sender, and for whom are these messages made? Do these leaders respond to the exigence of a pandemic with genuine concern, or is a placating motive to keep running a multimillion dollar business? I would love to expand on these questions in later research, and speak to those who received messages (students, staff, faculty, other stakeholders like alumni). It would make for a great dissertation chapter!
That said, to your specific question: some of themes definitely had late-stage capitalist notions, from my perspective. One theme which emerged focused on capital projects and financial projects in the middle of the pandemic – one sentence coded as such was, “As the university continues to navigate this pandemic, we have undertaken an assessment of our capital projects.” This may allude to the idea that, while there is a collective anxiety and disruption due to the pandemic, there is still a concern on the financial books. I think too the use of language about Universities as collective units or bodies in defeating the virus has been interesting to think about as well; these affirmative messages (“we at ___ university can defeat this together”) lead to questions of intent and motive; is it for the good of the student, or the good of the business?
jgerdes
1 year ago
Hi Emily,
I am so interested in this study that I have a number of follow-up questions (sorry! I know it’s hard to get it all on a single poster).
1. Aside from being doctorate-granting, what is the (geographic, political, demographic) context of these universities? How does that context help us understand the role and framing of these messages? Do you think the larger study of all of these messages will be generalizable to U.S. higher-ed institutions?
2. You mention “to analyze message content and themes, four messages from the corpus of emails were selected, sent between February and May 2020,” and I see in your comment that you mean you coded four emails from a corpus of 686. What led to your decision about scope?
3. After exploratory and descriptive/in-vivo coding, did you feel like you had the content to respond to digital design strategies to build community, promote PH recommendations, and foster empathy in particular? In other words, can you speak to process of moving from a research question about three specific topics (community, public health practices, and empathy) to your own coding scheme and whether your findings matched directly to these three topics?
4. What audiences are the target of your practice and pedagogy recommendations? In other words, who do you see as responsible for conducting close reviews of message design and thinking critically about message design? Do we know that the authors of these emails are not strategically and critically conducting these practices already?
5. Related to my #4 comment above, in recommendations, you mention investigating student, faculty, and staff audiences. Have you considered speaking to communication designers (e.g. comms staff in university president’s offices, COVID-19 Task Force members, or others responsible for crafting the messages)?
I am also eager to learn if this is part of a dissertation project and where you plan to go from here! I think there will be a lot of value in this study as my assumption is that university communications officials were falling back on either general disaster comms approaches or “normal times” best practices and would actually value insight in how to improve.
Hi, thank you for commenting! I’m glad you’re interested in knowing more; I love talking about these messages and the rhetorical choices that go into them. It was hard to discern what went into this poster, but choices had to be made!
To your questions above:
1. Aside from being doctorate-granting, what is the (geographic, political, demographic) context of these universities? How does that context help us understand the role and framing of these messages? Do you think the larger study of all of these messages will be generalizable to U.S. higher-ed institutions?
This is a great question. All of these universities are classified under the Carnegie system as R1 institutions, and they are on the East Coast and Midwest. They are all within the Big 10 academic/athletic group, which was my starting place for choosing Universities. My home institution is within this group, and I wanted to find institutions similar in student population, Carnegie status, and proximal geographic location; that is, domestic versus international. In this context, these communicators are likely working in Western, low-context communication styles.
I do not know confidently if these messages would generalize to all instructions across the United States. Thinking of different institutions – 2-year tech/trade schools, M1/M2 classified universities, private institutions, HBCUs, K-12 schools – I believe there would be differences in each of those types of schools, or even within each institution individually. I am curious to see what messages from each institution would look like though, and I do plan to expand into that territory in the coming years to paint a better picture.
2. You mention “to analyze message content and themes, four messages from the corpus of emails were selected, sent between February and May 2020,” and I see in your comment that you mean you coded four emails from a corpus of 686. What led to your decision about scope?
The short answer is time constraints. The long answer: Coding and analyzing 686 emails would take a tremendous amount of time, but in retrospect would have given a deeper picture of the themes and design moves. I would like to draw a bigger sample and expand the time range beyond 2020 as well.
3. After exploratory and descriptive/in-vivo coding, did you feel like you had the content to respond to digital design strategies to build community, promote PH recommendations, and foster empathy in particular? In other words, can you speak to process of moving from a research question about three specific topics (community, public health practices, and empathy) to your own coding scheme and whether your findings matched directly to these three topics?
I felt like there was enough content in the four messages to start addressing these, yes, but not a definitive “absolutely. Preliminary is a good way to frame it. Based on the coding and subsequent themes which emerged – clinical information (PH recommendations) and affirmation (empathy), in particular, were two of the more prevalent thematic codes. There’s not enough conclusive evidence to draw from four messages out of 650-plus, but there’s a snapshot enough here to indicate that affirmative messages and public health planning and preparation are in the design of these messages.
4. What audiences are the target of your practice and pedagogy recommendations? In other words, who do you see as responsible for conducting close reviews of message design and thinking critically about message design? Do we know that the authors of these emails are not strategically and critically conducting these practices already?
I envision technical communication and editing professionals, as well as teachers of technical communication, risk communication, and rhetoric (visual rhetoric, etc) as the target audience. Professionals can conduct close reviews of design using contextual, rhetorical knowledge to look for strategies about communicating health information, empathy, etc: are the messages doing so, are they doing so genuinely (if genuine is possible!), what can be done to do so better? And instructors, too, can utilize similar tools – rhetoric, visual design, designing risk communication – to teach a more effective message design strategy.
I’d like to assume best intent here – I do assume best intent – that these authors mean well when they say something like “stay healthy, safe, and well.” We are all really suffering in COVID-19 right now, it’s not a good time. At the same time, I think its important to be critical of design (and perhaps intent, being critical of neoliberal standpoints) of what’s going on here, too.
5. Related to my #4 comment above, in recommendations, you mention investigating student, faculty, and staff audiences. Have you considered speaking to communication designers (e.g. comms staff in university president’s offices, COVID-19 Task Force members, or others responsible for crafting the messages)?
I have! I would love to speak to some of the authors of these messages. I know that the President of my home institution is very hard to get appointments with, but I would be very interested in speaking to the communication designers/comm teams who work closely with her. I’d love, in particular, to see how closely involved she is in the design of this message and if she writes it or not (and if so, how much and what parts).
I am also eager to learn if this is part of a dissertation project and where you plan to go from here! I think there will be a lot of value in this study as my assumption is that university communications officials were falling back on either general disaster comms approaches or “normal times” best practices and would actually value insight in how to improve.
This is part of my larger dissertation work, yes. I am interested in pandemic communications, from both a rhetorical and technical communication standpoint. I think these emails are so fascinating and offer a real-time case study into how Jordan Frith mentioned in a recent JBTC issue that scholars in particular are “uniquely suited to address the pandemic” and “times of crisis” (Frith 2021). I see COVID-19 as an exigence that requires a huge response, and there’s lessons to be learned from it, both during and after. I don’t know if communication design will ever have a “normal” again – but that’s a different thought for a different poster!
ericastone
1 year ago
Hi Emily!
Thank you for sharing this important case study with the SIGDOC community!
I appreciated reading your answers to Jessica’s questions about coding method/ologies and Allegra’s questions about how your study might intersect with neoliberal and/or capitalist notions.
Building on their questions and your answer, I’m interested in hearing more about your recommendations. What instructions would you provide to technical or risk communication designers as they implement your recommendations? For example, under Practice & Pedagogy, you recommend that technical and risk communication designers, particularly post-secondary leaders, “conduct close reviews of message design and maintain an acute rhetorical awareness of audience.” Under Research & Development, you suggest that communication designers should “investigate student, faculty, and staff response to messages.” Although these bullet points are not aligned or related on your poster, I can see how the path forward for investigating each of them might be connected through field research, open forums, or town halls. I’m interested to hear more about your ideas for implementation along these lines!
Hi Erica, thank you for the comments, I appreciate them! I apologize in the delay in getting back to you.
This is a great question to ask. I’m teaching a section of technical communication right now and have thought, “if I were to teach this research presentation as part of my course, how would I go about it? What would I teach my students about crisis communication and how to do it better?”
I think one way I would suggest that students, designers, and researchers go about this is to first consider a research design that incorporates user experience and feedback alongside designers. This relates to your (great!) idea of town halls, forums, and field research as well.
If we take a user-as-expert approach, then: let’s assume our target “user” has been this immersed in online information and emails since the pandemic begun, who better to ask about what works in a message than someone who has lived through a pandemic and received these emails since day one? I would then recommend theories and methodologies such as human centered design (HCD) since it lets users, to quote Natasha Jones, “engage in design activities” (Jones 2016, p. 474). HCD, too, has the potential to engage issues of social justice as they relate the human experience through texts and technologies” (Jones 2016, p. 474).
Thus, applying HCD to a practice in technical communication might look like something you suggested – a field research project, asking users (email recipients) to design an email they might like to receive, and then transferring those ideas back to designers. Then, some reflection: what is similar between user and expert? What’s different, and why? What does the user want or desire in a message that the expert might not see that can redefine expertise?
There are lots of interesting ways to approach audience, user, and subject matter; this is just one idea that’s swirled around in my mind. Again, great question! I love to think about these things.
Well done. I am interesting in knowing what your initial coding scheme was? What types of codes did you find in your first round of coding?
Thank you, Jessica. I appreciate that feedback.
To answer your question, my coding work started with four messages selected at random from the overall 650-plus corpus of emails. In the two-stage coding process, the first coding cycle began with a read-through of each message and finding sentences, phrases, and messages with language about things such as greetings, timeframe, course modality, emergency planning, to name a few. I let the concepts emerge from the messages, and noted them as they came up, taking an open coding approach.
The overall codes which emerged in the first round were broad, since the open coding let the codes emerge from the text. But, some of preliminary ideas that were coming up in the first round included emergency planning, affirmative content, time, community, and infection control, in addition to the demographic codes (such as institution name, sender, and date sent).
I would be happy to share more about these codes if you’d like. There’s a wide range in the first round!
I would be interested. I always find different researchers’ coding approach unique, yet must be able to be replicated. Did you develop a coding scheme? It might be something to think about that could come out of your research.
Hi Jessica, happy to elaborate more! Thanks for coming back, too. I do have a coding scheme, yes. My coding scheme came about as I looked at each sentence of an email and looked for words that might characterize the sentence, or theme of the sentence. These words and themes became the codes for the scheme. In developing the coding scheme, I wanted to have a scheme to replicate with future messages and research, but also to answer the questions I posed for this project.
To draw from one example from my work: knowing I wanted to answer questions about building community, I encountered a sentence from a March 2020 email that said “The last two weeks have been unlike anything that we have collectively experienced.” This sentence has concepts of “we,” “collective,” and “experience” and coded as “Collective Experience” (or CoEx, in shorthand). The code CoEx was then added to my coding scheme for later use.
Thank you for explaining your coding process.
Of course! Happy to do so.
Emily, this work is fascinating! I am wondering if the themes that you noticed here connected with any neoliberal or late-stage capitalist notions? As we note how postsecondary educational institutions have become increasingly focused on profit mechanisms (thanks to shifting norms surrounding higher education, as well as slashed state budgets), it could be relevant to consider the similarities between universities’ messages and those of for-profit corporations (thinking of all of the “our commitment to our customers” and “keeping our team safe!” messages that I got from companies in the second week of March 2020).
Hi Allegra, thank you! Something I did think of while putting together this poster, and as I continue to watch these emails come in as the pandemic advances, changes, etc, is the idea of motive: what is the motivation of the sender, and for whom are these messages made? Do these leaders respond to the exigence of a pandemic with genuine concern, or is a placating motive to keep running a multimillion dollar business? I would love to expand on these questions in later research, and speak to those who received messages (students, staff, faculty, other stakeholders like alumni). It would make for a great dissertation chapter!
That said, to your specific question: some of themes definitely had late-stage capitalist notions, from my perspective. One theme which emerged focused on capital projects and financial projects in the middle of the pandemic – one sentence coded as such was, “As the university continues to navigate this pandemic, we have undertaken an assessment of our capital projects.” This may allude to the idea that, while there is a collective anxiety and disruption due to the pandemic, there is still a concern on the financial books. I think too the use of language about Universities as collective units or bodies in defeating the virus has been interesting to think about as well; these affirmative messages (“we at ___ university can defeat this together”) lead to questions of intent and motive; is it for the good of the student, or the good of the business?
Hi Emily,
I am so interested in this study that I have a number of follow-up questions (sorry! I know it’s hard to get it all on a single poster).
1. Aside from being doctorate-granting, what is the (geographic, political, demographic) context of these universities? How does that context help us understand the role and framing of these messages? Do you think the larger study of all of these messages will be generalizable to U.S. higher-ed institutions?
2. You mention “to analyze message content and themes, four messages from the corpus of emails were selected, sent between February and May 2020,” and I see in your comment that you mean you coded four emails from a corpus of 686. What led to your decision about scope?
3. After exploratory and descriptive/in-vivo coding, did you feel like you had the content to respond to digital design strategies to build community, promote PH recommendations, and foster empathy in particular? In other words, can you speak to process of moving from a research question about three specific topics (community, public health practices, and empathy) to your own coding scheme and whether your findings matched directly to these three topics?
4. What audiences are the target of your practice and pedagogy recommendations? In other words, who do you see as responsible for conducting close reviews of message design and thinking critically about message design? Do we know that the authors of these emails are not strategically and critically conducting these practices already?
5. Related to my #4 comment above, in recommendations, you mention investigating student, faculty, and staff audiences. Have you considered speaking to communication designers (e.g. comms staff in university president’s offices, COVID-19 Task Force members, or others responsible for crafting the messages)?
I am also eager to learn if this is part of a dissertation project and where you plan to go from here! I think there will be a lot of value in this study as my assumption is that university communications officials were falling back on either general disaster comms approaches or “normal times” best practices and would actually value insight in how to improve.
Hi, thank you for commenting! I’m glad you’re interested in knowing more; I love talking about these messages and the rhetorical choices that go into them. It was hard to discern what went into this poster, but choices had to be made!
To your questions above:
1. Aside from being doctorate-granting, what is the (geographic, political, demographic) context of these universities? How does that context help us understand the role and framing of these messages? Do you think the larger study of all of these messages will be generalizable to U.S. higher-ed institutions?
This is a great question. All of these universities are classified under the Carnegie system as R1 institutions, and they are on the East Coast and Midwest. They are all within the Big 10 academic/athletic group, which was my starting place for choosing Universities. My home institution is within this group, and I wanted to find institutions similar in student population, Carnegie status, and proximal geographic location; that is, domestic versus international. In this context, these communicators are likely working in Western, low-context communication styles.
I do not know confidently if these messages would generalize to all instructions across the United States. Thinking of different institutions – 2-year tech/trade schools, M1/M2 classified universities, private institutions, HBCUs, K-12 schools – I believe there would be differences in each of those types of schools, or even within each institution individually. I am curious to see what messages from each institution would look like though, and I do plan to expand into that territory in the coming years to paint a better picture.
2. You mention “to analyze message content and themes, four messages from the corpus of emails were selected, sent between February and May 2020,” and I see in your comment that you mean you coded four emails from a corpus of 686. What led to your decision about scope?
The short answer is time constraints. The long answer: Coding and analyzing 686 emails would take a tremendous amount of time, but in retrospect would have given a deeper picture of the themes and design moves. I would like to draw a bigger sample and expand the time range beyond 2020 as well.
3. After exploratory and descriptive/in-vivo coding, did you feel like you had the content to respond to digital design strategies to build community, promote PH recommendations, and foster empathy in particular? In other words, can you speak to process of moving from a research question about three specific topics (community, public health practices, and empathy) to your own coding scheme and whether your findings matched directly to these three topics?
I felt like there was enough content in the four messages to start addressing these, yes, but not a definitive “absolutely. Preliminary is a good way to frame it. Based on the coding and subsequent themes which emerged – clinical information (PH recommendations) and affirmation (empathy), in particular, were two of the more prevalent thematic codes. There’s not enough conclusive evidence to draw from four messages out of 650-plus, but there’s a snapshot enough here to indicate that affirmative messages and public health planning and preparation are in the design of these messages.
4. What audiences are the target of your practice and pedagogy recommendations? In other words, who do you see as responsible for conducting close reviews of message design and thinking critically about message design? Do we know that the authors of these emails are not strategically and critically conducting these practices already?
I envision technical communication and editing professionals, as well as teachers of technical communication, risk communication, and rhetoric (visual rhetoric, etc) as the target audience. Professionals can conduct close reviews of design using contextual, rhetorical knowledge to look for strategies about communicating health information, empathy, etc: are the messages doing so, are they doing so genuinely (if genuine is possible!), what can be done to do so better? And instructors, too, can utilize similar tools – rhetoric, visual design, designing risk communication – to teach a more effective message design strategy.
I’d like to assume best intent here – I do assume best intent – that these authors mean well when they say something like “stay healthy, safe, and well.” We are all really suffering in COVID-19 right now, it’s not a good time. At the same time, I think its important to be critical of design (and perhaps intent, being critical of neoliberal standpoints) of what’s going on here, too.
5. Related to my #4 comment above, in recommendations, you mention investigating student, faculty, and staff audiences. Have you considered speaking to communication designers (e.g. comms staff in university president’s offices, COVID-19 Task Force members, or others responsible for crafting the messages)?
I have! I would love to speak to some of the authors of these messages. I know that the President of my home institution is very hard to get appointments with, but I would be very interested in speaking to the communication designers/comm teams who work closely with her. I’d love, in particular, to see how closely involved she is in the design of this message and if she writes it or not (and if so, how much and what parts).
I am also eager to learn if this is part of a dissertation project and where you plan to go from here! I think there will be a lot of value in this study as my assumption is that university communications officials were falling back on either general disaster comms approaches or “normal times” best practices and would actually value insight in how to improve.
This is part of my larger dissertation work, yes. I am interested in pandemic communications, from both a rhetorical and technical communication standpoint. I think these emails are so fascinating and offer a real-time case study into how Jordan Frith mentioned in a recent JBTC issue that scholars in particular are “uniquely suited to address the pandemic” and “times of crisis” (Frith 2021). I see COVID-19 as an exigence that requires a huge response, and there’s lessons to be learned from it, both during and after. I don’t know if communication design will ever have a “normal” again – but that’s a different thought for a different poster!
Hi Emily!
Thank you for sharing this important case study with the SIGDOC community!
I appreciated reading your answers to Jessica’s questions about coding method/ologies and Allegra’s questions about how your study might intersect with neoliberal and/or capitalist notions.
Building on their questions and your answer, I’m interested in hearing more about your recommendations. What instructions would you provide to technical or risk communication designers as they implement your recommendations? For example, under Practice & Pedagogy, you recommend that technical and risk communication designers, particularly post-secondary leaders, “conduct close reviews of message design and maintain an acute rhetorical awareness of audience.” Under Research & Development, you suggest that communication designers should “investigate student, faculty, and staff response to messages.” Although these bullet points are not aligned or related on your poster, I can see how the path forward for investigating each of them might be connected through field research, open forums, or town halls. I’m interested to hear more about your ideas for implementation along these lines!
Hi Erica, thank you for the comments, I appreciate them! I apologize in the delay in getting back to you.
This is a great question to ask. I’m teaching a section of technical communication right now and have thought, “if I were to teach this research presentation as part of my course, how would I go about it? What would I teach my students about crisis communication and how to do it better?”
I think one way I would suggest that students, designers, and researchers go about this is to first consider a research design that incorporates user experience and feedback alongside designers. This relates to your (great!) idea of town halls, forums, and field research as well.
If we take a user-as-expert approach, then: let’s assume our target “user” has been this immersed in online information and emails since the pandemic begun, who better to ask about what works in a message than someone who has lived through a pandemic and received these emails since day one? I would then recommend theories and methodologies such as human centered design (HCD) since it lets users, to quote Natasha Jones, “engage in design activities” (Jones 2016, p. 474). HCD, too, has the potential to engage issues of social justice as they relate the human experience through texts and technologies” (Jones 2016, p. 474).
Thus, applying HCD to a practice in technical communication might look like something you suggested – a field research project, asking users (email recipients) to design an email they might like to receive, and then transferring those ideas back to designers. Then, some reflection: what is similar between user and expert? What’s different, and why? What does the user want or desire in a message that the expert might not see that can redefine expertise?
There are lots of interesting ways to approach audience, user, and subject matter; this is just one idea that’s swirled around in my mind. Again, great question! I love to think about these things.
Awesome! Thanks, Emily!