ABSTRACT
Research in intergroup communication has a long history (see Chapters 1 & 2, this volume), with much of the impetus coming from disciplines other than communication, a relative latecomer to the systematic study of role, culture, and organization from an intergroup perspective. Rather, research took place under the heading of intergroup relations (in social psychology, sociology, and political science), intercultural relations (in anthropology and linguistics), or identity (in all these disciplines). The methods of those disciplines came to be employed to study communication (and miscommunication) across group boundaries. In this chapter, we review this diverse and eclectic history, through which virtually every method in social sciences research has been used extensively. We consider many types of quantitative research: experiments, surveys, and questionnaires using direct and indirect measures. We also examine socio-cognitive methods, concentrating on language-based ones (Linguistic Category Model/Linguistic Intergroup Bias, Implicit Attitude Test, linguistic priming). We then turn to qualitative methods, including discourse analysis, discursive psychology, conversation analysis, and ethnography. We canvass some new technology, mainly methods for data organization, textual mining, and visualization, that permit detailed exploration of larger amounts of data.
