Methodological Considerations: Frameworks and Rubrics

Abstract

This chapter reviews the diverse ways in which popularization discourse is analyzed in the current academic literature. First, it discusses goals and formats of text analysis in general. We specifically focus on quantitative text analysis as a way to produce data matrices and qualitative text analysis to categorize data into themes. In the literature, popularization discourse is analyzed either through frameworks or rubrics. Frameworks give insight into textual components, or strategies, whereas rubrics contain assessment criteria. In this chapter, the main insight is that although current frameworks and rubrics do provide insight into popularization discourse as a genre, it is impossible to produce one overarching framework of strategies that make up popularization discourse purely from these frameworks/rubrics. This gap also points to bigger methodological issues in the current academic literature, which are also discussed in this chapter.