As part of a recurring interview series over at the Qualitative Political Communication Research blog, I shared some of my ideas about civic tech and methods with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Among them, thoughts on generalizability:

For me, the more important divide is between inductive/deductive, rather than qualitative, quantitative. In addition to excelling at depth, etc., qualitative research is important for its ability to get at inductive questions. In that case, it can certainly be generalizable, revealing broader, emergent concepts or happenings, which are really important for this moment in political communication and civic media research.

as well as what type of questions political comm should be grappling with more broadly.

Another part of this is that I think an important follow-up to the big question “What does citizenship look like today?” is “Well, how can we make that better–less transactive, more meaningful, reflective, and overall better?”

Check out the whole thing over there!