ABSTRACT
This chapter examines, with illustrations from the author's past studies in journalism, how the comparative research network functions as a methodological aid in solving the equivalence problem in regard to conceptualization and data gathering. It also examines how such a network serves to render contextualization a useful aid in explaining the similarities and differences among media systems. The development of the trend toward comparative communication is analogous to the growth of collaborative research in physical sciences and engineering, where co-authored papers, with co-authors from within a country and without, were observed to have become rather common in the 1990s. Globalization, coupled with the development of this global communication network, has significantly transformed academic work. The chapter discusses the belief-reality gap among journalists in Greater China in their orientations toward journalistic ethics, with mainland Chinese showing the largest gap and Hong Kong the smallest.
