Dr. David L. Altheide
Welcome to my
cyberspace! This homepage provides information about my research and
publications, courses, expertise and current projects. Check it out and feel
free to send me an e-mail note for
more information.
An Overview...
My work over 3 decades has
focused on the areas of
1. Mass Communication,
2. Qualitative Research
Methods,
3. Deviant Behavior,
4. Propaganda and Official
Information,
5. Social Control
Twelve books and
approximately 160 papers have been published or presented at professional
conferences. For a complete record, please see my Curriculum
Vitae. My modest contributions were recognized when I received the George Herbert Mead
Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
(2005) and The
Mentor Excellence Award (2007) from the same academic society. The most
recent books are:
Terror Post 9/11 and the Media. New York: Lang. 2009.
Terrorism and the Politics of Fear.
Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis.
Qualitative
Media Analysis.
An
Ecology of Communication: Cultural Formats of Control.
Media
Worlds in the Postjournalism Era. With Robert P. Snow.
In addition to serving as
Interim Director (or Chair), I have taught dozens of different courses over a
four-decade career. Currently, courses are oriented to a social science
approach to the "study of social justice." These courses include
undergraduate offerings at the Introductory level to
graduate seminars on the mass media and qualitative research methods.
.My major expertise is the mass media. This is
central to all social sciences and especially justice studies because the
nature and process of defining situations for people influences what they do
and what the consequences will be. The mass media and information technology
are major influences of this process. The major concepts that are discussed in
many of our publications include Media Logic, Media Culture, Communication
Formats, and Ecology of Communication. Our work has identified the critical
elements of successful media messages, as well as how to prepare people to work
with the news media. Related areas are Popular Culture; Media and News Bias;
New Journalism; Crime and Media; Violence and Media; Sports and Media; War,
Peace and Media; Cyberspace and Control; Cyberspace Research. My recent
work has focused on how news reports about "fear" (Fear and Media)
have changed over several decades. "Tracking Discourse" is a
multi-faceted research approach that joins qualitative methods to on-line
information bases such as NEXIS and the Internet. My students and I are now investigating how
the language of certain institutions (e.g., law enforcement and military) has
infused popular culture. Some of this
work and the approach that we use is noted below.
. The most important
theoretical foundation for qualitative research is Symbolic Interaction SSSI. With
colleagues, I have examined all aspects of qualitative research, including
interviewing, ethnography, and most recently, Ethnographic Content Analysis,
Qualitative Content Analysis; Document and Media Analysis. (Also Social Construction of Reality). Ethnographic Content
Analysis was introduced in 1987 (“Ethnographic
Content Analysis,” Qualitative Sociology, 1987,10: 65-77), and is now regarded as a specific method of
qualitative analysis. We have been
fortunate to formulate this work in papers and
seminars with other social science approaches to develop integrated and
"triangulated research designs" and use these in basic as well as
applied social research.
. With Dr. Dee Ann Spencer, I evaluated the New Schools
Pilot Project for the State of
.A comprehensive curriculum has been tested and established in "real schools" to provide teachers with applied "hands on" research awareness and skills so that they can assess their own teaching strategies and make adjustments to provide improved education to their students.
. Several "community partnership" projects focus on "process evaluation" or how changes and interventions occur, and the best way to develop, measure and assess their effectiveness.