ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, several group communication scholars at the University of Illinois (Dean Hewes, Bob McPhee, Scott Poole, and the second author) and their graduate students (including the first author) sought to peer deeper into “the black box” of group interaction processes. Their work was both theoretical (Structuration Theory perspective: Poole, Seibold, & McPhee, 1985; Socio-Egocentric Model: Hewes, 1986) and empirical (coding group argument, group development, group decision-making, group valence). Graduate courses, research team projects, and collegial conversations centered on how best to analyze and explain communicative processes in decision-making groups. The methodological solution to wide-ranging questions in this vein almost always involved coding group interaction. The questions could not be answered adequately and/or only by predicting from inputs to outputs, or by querying group participants about what they would say (or said they did) if they were in a group setting, or by asking students to write communicative responses to scenarios. In order to understand the complexity and seeming ambiguity of group communicative processes, it was necessary to scrutinize the data produced during members’ discussions.
