Etic and emic data production methods in the study of journalistic work practices: A systematic literature review

Abstract

This methodological paper discusses the application of etic and emic perspectives in producing data sets for the study of journalistic praxis. The concepts refer to the researcher-analyst’s and the practitioner-informant’s viewpoints, respectively, and that being the case, they have inherent weaknesses if used independently. We argue that these shortcomings can be mitigated through an integrated application of the concepts and by seeing the two perspectives as complementary to each other. Combining etic and emic perspectives will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of complex yet routinized real-life behaviour such as journalistic work. Following the appraisal of the etic-emic combination methodology, we present the results of a systematic literature review. We explore the application of this methodology in the study of journalistic work, as recounted in international journal articles published between 2000 and 2017. After keyword searches into several databases and a manual review of 3018 items, a corpus of 228 relevant articles was analysed. Our results demonstrate the studies’ disproportionate emphasis on the earliest phases of the journalistic process, that is, topic discovery, topic selection, point of view selection and sourcing, and the relative scarcity of studies applying a fully integrated etic-emic-combination methodology. We also report on, for example, the types of research material used and the media studied. We conclude with recommendations for expanding and diversifying the use of etic-emic-combination methodology in journalism studies to give us a more balanced understanding of the field.