Annotating the Literature and Theory as a Lens

Tonight: from sources to a lens

• You have searched. Now you read, and reading has a structure.
• First half: what to extract from a manuscript, including numbers you will need later
• Second half: theory, which decides what you look at and what you ignore
• Three annotated manuscripts are due next week. Tonight builds the method.
• The reading, Cohen (1992), is short and consequential. It sits between the halves.

Where the search stopped

• Saturation ended the searching. Synthesis begins here.
• A stack of PDFs is not a literature review. It is raw material.
• Reading for annotation is different from reading for interest
• You are extracting a fixed set of things from every manuscript
• Extract the same things every time and the sources become comparable

What a weak review sounds like

Hamilton, Garretson, and Kerne (2014) studied Twitch as a participatory community. Sjöblom and Hamari (2017) examined viewer motivations. Hilvert-Bruce and colleagues (2018) studied social motivations for engagement.

• Three disconnected summaries in a row
• The reader learns what each study was about, and nothing about how they relate
• This is what annotation without synthesis produces

What a strong review does

• Groups sources by theme rather than by author or date
• Names the convergence: what these studies, together, have established
• Adds nuance: where they disagree, or where one qualifies another
• Names a shared limitation, which is usually where your gap lives
• Example: survey research converges on livestream viewing being socially motivated, but all of it is self-report, so nobody has checked the behavioral trace

What to mark in a manuscript

• The research question, in the authors’ own words, and the theory behind it
• The design: unit of analysis, sample, how the key construct was measured
• The effect size and the sample size used to detect it
• The limitation the authors admit, and the one they do not
• One sentence you would be willing to quote in your own methods section

Why you extract the effect size

• Beyond surveying what is known, a review does effect size extraction
• Before you can justify a sample size, you need a defensible estimate of the effect you expect to find
• The most defensible source is prior published research
• Record Cohen’s d, Cramer’s V, or a correlation r, plus the n the authors used
• Those numbers become the inputs to your power analysis
• A review that cannot supply an effect size estimate has not finished its job

Cohen on the hard part

“Researchers find specifying the ES the most difficult part of power analysis.”

Cohen (1992, p. 156)

• ES is his abbreviation for effect size
• The literature review is how that difficulty becomes tractable: you borrow an estimate from studies that already did the measuring

Practicing the move

• Pick a published study close to your design
• Extract its primary effect size and note whether the authors reported a power analysis
• Use the pwr package to find the n needed to detect that effect at 80% power
• Then the harder case: no prior study reports an effect for your question
• Be ready to defend two strategies for justifying a sample size anyway

Four kinds of gap

• Topical void: a phenomenon, population, or context no one has studied
• Methodological gap: studied, but with methods that carry an important limitation
• Contradiction: two well-designed studies reaching opposite conclusions
• Theoretical gap: explained through one lens where another would illuminate more
• Caution on the void: what looks novel is often covered under other terminology

Articulating the gap

1. Establish what is known. Show you understand the conversation.
2. Identify the limitation. What is missing, contradictory, or unexplained.
3. Argue for your study. How your design addresses exactly that.

Known, then limitation, then what this study does. The topic changes; the hinge does not.

The literature map

• A markdown file in your project, organized by theme rather than alphabetically
• One heading per theme, sources listed beneath, plus a running section for gaps
• It shows at a glance which themes are well covered and which are thin
• It forces you to think about how sources relate, which is the start of synthesis
• Its structure usually becomes the structure of the written review

A minimum viable review

• Source A, one sentence: what did this study find?
• Source B, one sentence: what did this study find?
• Source C, one sentence: what did this study find?
• The gap, one sentence: what do these three, together, leave unexplored?
• Four sentences, three citations, one gap. Enough to anchor a prospectus.
• The full synthesis paragraph is what this grows into, not where you start.

Citation is ethical, not clerical

• Specific empirical findings, theoretical concepts, methodological approaches: cite
• Direct quotes always. Paraphrased ideas unless genuinely common knowledge.
• No citation needed for “Twitch is a livestreaming platform”, your own interpretations, or your own data and analysis
• Over-citation is rarely criticized. Under-citation damages credibility.
• In its serious forms it is plagiarism, which is a breach of trust before it is a rule

One finding, three explanations

• Chapter 4 ended on a finding: livestream viewing looks more socially motivated than content motivated
• Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973): viewers are active agents meeting a social need a finished video cannot meet
• Parasocial interaction (Horton & Wohl, 1956): viewers form one-sided bonds, and the social feeling is that bond being felt
• Social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979): the community is a group, and chat is a space of belonging
• Same pattern, three research programs

Theory is not speculation

• A theory is a formal, systematic explanation of relationships between concepts
• Good theories are logically coherent, generalizable, falsifiable, and generative
• Social identity theory predicts viewers rate their community above rivals on subjective dimensions like authenticity
• It predicts defensive responses when a streamer or community is criticized
• Change the domain and it predicts partisans rating aligned outlets as more credible
• The theory does not change. The domain does. That is what makes it testable.

The lens metaphor

• A theory brings some elements into focus and pushes others out of the frame
• Appraisal theory points you at individual cognitive evaluation, so you build surveys and experiments measuring individual reaction
• Social identity theory points you at group meaning, so you analyze how members talk about the stream and how boundaries get policed
• Same phenomenon, different designs, neither wrong
• You cannot use every lens at once. That produces blur, not richness.

Three paradigms

• Social scientific: an objective reality, observable and measurable. Deductive. Asks “does X cause Y?”
• Interpretive: reality socially constructed through interaction. Inductive. Asks “what does X mean to the people who experience it?”
• Critical and cultural: power shapes what counts as knowledge. Asks “whose interests does X serve, and whose voices are silenced?”
• Each treats theory differently: as a source of predictions, as an outcome of observation, or as a tool for exposing structure

Grand and middle-range

• Grand theories explain human behavior across all contexts: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism
• Intellectually powerful, and too broad to design a study that could disprove them
• Middle-range theories are specific enough to generate testable hypotheses, broad enough to travel beyond one case
• Merton named the zone. Most communication research lives in it.
• Every theory in the catalog ahead is middle-range

The catalog, part one

• Parasocial interaction (Horton & Wohl, 1956): one-sided bonds that feel intimate without reciprocity. Explains donations to a streamer you have never met.
• Social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979): group membership shapes self-concept, producing in-group favoritism and boundary policing through emotes and slang
• Agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972): media do not tell people what to think, but what to think about. The front page and category rankings set an agenda.

The catalog, part two

• Framing (Goffman, 1974; Entman, 1993): the same facts, differently emphasized, produce different conclusions. Visible in how streamers title their own broadcasts.
• Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973): audiences actively select media to meet needs. The lens behind most viewer-motivation research.
• Cultivation (Gerbner & Gross, 1976): cumulative exposure shapes perceptions of social reality, most strongly where audiences lack direct experience

Two lenses, four messages

DragoBoi89: xQc actually playing well today wtf

emotelord: PogU PogU

realnamedfan: @xqcow do u remember when u said hi to me last week

streamfan22: chat is this real

Four messages from one stretch of a real broadcast. Read them once before we code them.

What each lens foregrounds

• Uses and gratifications asks what need each viewer is meeting: evaluative commentary, collective emotional expression, direct acknowledgement, group sense-making
• All four viewers are equally interesting, because each shows a different gratification
• Parasocial interaction asks what the bond looks like: realnamedfan’s @-address plus a memory claim is the textbook case
• emotelord and streamfan22 never address the streamer, so this lens pushes them aside
• Same data, two stories. Your prospectus commits to one.

Before Week 5

• Due: Annotated Manuscripts (3) and your CITI Certification
• Read Chapter 5 (variables and hypotheses) and Chapter 6 (research questions), with the graduate edition toggle on
• Read the assigned article: Gelman and Loken (2014), “The statistical crisis in science”
• Write your journal entry, 450 to 500 words, engaging both the chapters and the reading
• Start CITI early. It takes longer than anyone expects.