Multilevel Analysis in Critical Research (original) (raw)

1987, Annals of the International Communication Association

VER the past few years, the critical approach to communication has been increasingly recognized and used. In spite of the considerable differences that can be found within "the" critical approach, two common strands can be identified. First, the position of critique can be found in most critical approaches. Described most generally as "reflection on a system of constraints which are humanly produced" (Connerton, 1978, p. 18), the position of critique questions the Hnaturalness" of human experience. Critique seeks to undermine "the everyday attitude that identifies what one perceives with what is" (Appelbaum & Cotiner, 1979, p. 74) and brings to the surface the underlying processes and relationships that shape and govern the surface world. This concern with revealing deep structures and realities is combined in most critical approaches with a second common idea, namely, a conception of the social world that stresses the complexity and multiplicity of existing relationships. In emphasizing complex and multiple relationships, critical approaches seek to connect traditionally separate ideas and processes such as social structure and human agency, the material and the symbolic, and so forth. Grossberg (1984), in a recent review, has shown the many ways in which different critical approaches conceptualize the relationship between society and culture. Although the differences in some cases are quite substantial, all critical approaches maintain conceptually the idea of an inherent complexity in social relationships. Extremes of structural determinism and individualistic voluntarism are avoided typically by proposing some concept that stresses processes of mutual determination and influence thought to operate between human symbolic activity on the one hand and society or social structure on the other. Although ideas like the "duality of structure" (Giddens, 1979, 1984) or the "double articulation of social structure and human praxis" (Bhaskar,