Rob Logan (part I)
Rob Logan - Part I: 20th-century career developments and influences
By Robert A. Logan Ph.D., School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, 1977
Introduction to Part I
Instead of focusing on contributions, I will snatch a career portrait invitation to introduce a few origins of my professional life. I will note a couple of experiences that became career touchstones and mention a few mentors and ideas that influenced my research.
While I have been distracted by life events such as personal relationships, family responsibilities, volunteer professional chores, tennis, military service, travel, and daily details, my career direction is semi-linear. It was launched in a Chicago bookstore during my first urban, solo foray around age 16.
The profile is divided into two parts, which focus on 20th—and 21st-century career influences and developments. Part I explores zen and life shock in a bookstore, science journalism, Joye Patterson, and William Stephenson’s ideas. References are provided at the end of each part.
Zen and Life Shock in a Bookstore
On a fall Friday afternoon (circa 1964), I walked a familiar stretch of Michigan Avenue alone for the first time to meet my mother and grandmother @ Orchestra Hall (the home of the Chicago Symphony). While I am unsure why I was unleashed that day, the experience was my first taste of big-city freedom. As a kid and a teen, yes, I walked solo in the suburban town where I was raised and in similar areas. But until that afternoon, unchaperoned downtown Chicago visits were verboten. I remember the thrill of being trusted and the initial chance to experience what I long relished - self-determined hours in a sophisticated urban environment.
Strolling south, I dropped by Stuart Brent Books. For years, I heard local and visiting professionals (e.g. physicians, attorneys, professors, engineers, researchers, journalists, writers, and a range of readers) uniformly praise it (stuart-brent-books-a-memory, n.d.) Full disclosure: I had met Stuart Brent (a writer, public intellectual, television host, professor, store owner, and neighbor) a couple of times (about-stuart-and-the-brent-family, n.d.). Despite requests, I could not convince an elder to accompany me to the renowned bookstore. And I certainly lacked the self-confidence to ask Prof. Brent to invite me there.
Inside, I quickly noticed that an uncharacteristically modest display space was devoted to best-selling books and periodicals. A contrastingly large magazine rack carried the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA - published in the neighborhood), Science, the University of Chicago Law Review, Harvard Business Review, and other disciplinary-focused publications that I had never seen (or heard of). Similarly, a centerpiece space was devoted to new books about medical research, legal issues, architectural design, and research in an array of disciplines. Many adjacent shelves contained books about the arts, philosophy, history, new plays, novels, poetry, and literary criticism. I noticed many of the centerpiece books were published by universities worldwide in addition to the usual commercial publishers.
The bookstore also carried some rarely available British newspapers and magazines (e.g. The Economist, The Guardian, The Times) and sometimes received the New York Times on the day it was published (a then-Midwestern rarity). In another first, some available newspapers, periodicals, and books were in non-English languages.
Already overwhelmed, I began thumbing through JAMA. While I grasped a sentence or two within an abstract or editorial, I understood little else. My frustration persisted as I browsed a few other journals and a couple of academic books.
I asked myself, "What is this? Why can’t I understand anything?” While I was told I attended an academically rigorous public high school, why was I so ill-prepared for books and periodicals written in British and American English?
Educationally disoriented and embarrassed by my ignorance, I was somewhat overcome. While I lacked the vocabulary to explain it at the time, I underwent a bipolar exhilaration and humiliation crowned by cognitive dissonance.
Still, I was drawn to understand and appreciate a personally stunning experience. Why am I so emotionally ajar, I thought? Is this feeling an outsized embarrassment or what the Japanese call zen? Hoping it might be the latter, I avoided anger at myself or the messengers (the authors and publishers) and did not conclude that intellectual work was alien. Instead, I knew I had to make personal sense of what I experienced and how it made me feel.
I decided to give myself some time to let the upheaval sink in… After a few weeks, I began to realize that the bookstore life shock was a reaction to my first exposure to unfiltered knowledge. I recognized (probably for the first time) that all the textbooks I read in high school and most of the materials I had read in familiar (and most popular) books and periodicals targeted those sans professional knowledge or expertise.
I pondered the Grand Canyon gap between public knowledge and professional proficiency. Looking back, I guess I could have been angry that school textbooks and popular mass media were dumbed down. I also could have been upset about a conspiracy of scholars and professionals to sustain what Thayer (1974) called an ‘epistemic community,’ or a self-contained group defined by an enduring, exclusive, and shared vocabulary that was inaccessible to outsiders.
However, I began to appreciate those who tried to help people understand knowledge and remove some barriers. It struck me that the mass communication of knowledge was an honorable pursuit, and respect emerged for dedicated journalists and writers.
Over time, the latter morphed into an admiration for persons who create knowledge. I began to imagine that scholarship (regardless of discipline) was also a highly honorable and productive use of one’s time and career (albeit quite different than journalism).
I’m not sure when I started daydreaming about the professional combination that awaited me - careers in journalism and as a mass communication scholar. But as related dreams resurfaced, I sensed I would never be self-satisfied if I did not pursue them.
Science Journalism and Joye Patterson
After years consumed by distractions, I decided to step up and learn how to be a journalist. I saw journalism as a practical route to start at least one of the two careers I envisioned. Comparatively speaking, learning how to mass communicate knowledge seemed quicker and less expensive than being a knowledge creator. So, I started modestly…
From the start of my M.A. at the Missouri School of Journalism, I knew I was interested in writing or editing about professionals who excelled at their respective professions, jobs, and crafts. The latter scope was wide enough to include attorneys, architects, economists, clergy, artists, mass media creators, and policymakers, to name a few. After several months, I realized the most interesting and personally meaningful challenge was explaining science and medical research.
Compared to other professions and endeavors, science and biomedicine impressed me as the most evidence-based and the most committed to fully disclosing methods and communicating the limitations of evidentiary findings. Comparatively, the methodological steps to obtain evidence, its rigor, and intra-professional communication seemed more foundational. In science and biomedical research, investigator independence, judgment, detail, disclosure, and self-criticism were normative.
I also realized that I would never be bored covering science and medical research. I would be perpetually overwhelmed by the expanding spectrum of new and diverse knowledge from different disciplines, similar to the exhilarating rush and challenge that I first experienced at Brent Books.
Initially, Mizzou journalism professor Joye Patterson helped me understand how to write about science for lay audiences. From the outset, Patterson emphasized the professional rifts between scientists and journalists, which impacted my science writing efforts and, later, my transition to mass communication research (Joye Patterson remembered, n.d.).
Patterson explained the best approach to covering science and medicine was to focus on research. She added the best way to impress a physician or scientist was to note the discrepancies between the conclusions describing a study in press releases and the actual data. The latter encouraged me to learn how to understand a study’s comparative rigor and whether the rhetoric that explained contributions in news releases exaggerated its findings.
Patterson’s guidance improved my work, differentiated my approach, and helped me become more self-critical (which cultivated my future skills as an editor). As I looked for discrepancies between data, headlines, and summaries, I slowly noticed other research details, such as whether the hypotheses were carefully derived from a literature review, the extent to which a study’s data were accessible, and whether the research had an underlying theoretical framework. While I rarely wrote about the latter issues (and had negligible newsroom time to pursue them), the effort triggered an unexpected long-term impact. I began to become familiar enough with the research process to consider the next step: learning how to generate knowledge.
Yet, when Joye Patterson advanced the idea that I seek a Ph.D. in mass communication, she explained that I needed to appreciate the difference between research and scholarship. She explained a researcher focused on the types of methodological and reporting details to which I was becoming accustomed. But Patterson added a scholar exhibited a broader capacity to embed research data within the extant literature and contextualize the greater importance of individual or collective studies within a field’s underlying conceptual frameworks. Patterson also emphasized the need for a scholar to think conceptually, both conventionally and unconventionally, and relish making sense of seemingly conflicting ideas.
While I was grateful for Patterson’s counsel, I had little confidence that I could advance from a researcher into a scholar until she introduced me to her mentor and colleague, Missouri journalism professor William Stephenson.
William Stephenson’s Ideas
I met Stephenson during his final year at Missouri in 1973. He then became a visiting professor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he co-directed my doctoral studies from 1974-77.
Soon after our introduction, I discovered that as a young scientist in the 1920s, Stephenson participated in the development of two foundational 20th-century fields: physics and psychology and one subfield, psychometrics (Good, 2010). Stephenson (who was British) received a doctorate in physics and psychology during the first third of the 20th century. Stephenson’s mass communication scholarship began about 30 years after his contributions to the other two.
As a young physicist, Stephenson witnessed an era when his peers lined up into schools of thought based on significant yet conflicting evidence regarding whether light was a particle or a wave. Bohr’s transformative idea that each was complementary (and not mutually exclusive) became a foundation in physics and influenced at least three of Stephenson’s conceptual cornerstones (Stephenson, 1988a; Good, 2010).
First, Stephenson gleaned that conventional scientific wisdom (even if evidence-based) could accidentally become one-dimensional and self-reinforcing if alternative concepts, approaches, and data were not considered. So, to Stephenson, unconventional ideas needed to be generated and explored as part of science’s self-correcting process. Second, Stephenson became more impressed by those who perceived that scientific progress sometimes reflected inferential leaps instead of widely accepted constructs scientific judgment was a byproduct of induction, deduction, and falsification (Stephenson, 1961; Stephenson, 1988b). While Stephenson appreciated evidence-based logical positivism, he noted the persistence of inconsistent ideas, incomplete data, indeterminism, and empirical uncertainty in scientific inquiry. From this, he gleaned that a degree of subjectivity was omnipresent in scientific approaches - and investigator inference occasionally required abduction infused by individual creativity (Stephenson, 1961). Third, since the latter ideas were not embraced by his peers during the first third of the 20th century, Stephenson perceived their oversight as a rich opportunity to establish a research career.
Stephenson pioneered Q technique and methodology to systematically assess the latent subjectivity in human notions, feelings, abstractions, suggestions, inferences, and ideas in science and elsewhere (qmethod.org, n.d.). He proposed that human subjectivity could be systematically assessed and introduced Q method’s philosophical underpinnings and pragmatic tools to sustain its use (qmethod.org, n.d.). Throughout a six-decade career, Stephenson remained mindful that Q was less an end than intended to address a niche in the philosophy of science and scientific approaches.
Apple Computer’s late 20th-century advertising pitch, ‘Think different,’ also described Stephenson’s apperception, approach, and scholarship. For example, Stephenson’s initial application of his ideas to psychometrics and statistical inference in social science inverted population study datasets. Instead of inserting the participants in a dataset’s vertical column (from 1-n) and providing their responses (to items/tests) in horizontal rows (or people by items/tests), Stephenson recommended this should be inverted (or assess items/tests by people) (Stephenson, 1935).
While straightforward to execute, the transposition reframes research approaches in psychometrics within the humanities and social sciences. As people-by-test datasets are designed to assess pre-selected constructs and concepts drawn from the extant literature, test-by-people datasets are best suited to generate new conceptual frameworks or ideas.
One of the most consistent elements of Stephenson’s research was the generation of alternative conceptual frameworks that were the byproduct of his distinctive methods. The latter reflected his interest in using quantitative and mixed methods for construct/hypotheses exploration rather than verification. His alternative research methods sought to unlock the potential for factors (clusters of like-minded judgments generated by a study’s participants instead of the investigators) to emerge that potentially provided new conceptual frameworks, hypotheses, and ideas (Stephenson, 1977).
Stephenson’s approach was first applied to mass communication research in the 1960s (about a decade before I met him). At the start of Stephenson’s mass communication research career, a prevailing evidence-based construct suggested adults converged on print media for information gain (e.g. to become better informed). Fittingly, he immediately explored whether the process of reader engagement was conceptually more expansive.
In his initial Q studies of news readers, Stephenson found some participants fit the prevailing construct that linked interest in news reading with being a better-informed citizen, employee, parent, fan, investor, etc. Yet, at the same time, Stephenson’s initial studies suggested others were drawn in by a mass media-generated experience that prompted self-reflection during a habitual daily interlude (Stephenson, 1967). Some persons habitually read a newspaper (or attended to print media) at the same time, in the same place, and in the same order daily. The daily ritual was something people looked forward to - and they were frustrated by any interruptions. In the process, these readers often lost track of time and mentioned how the experience fostered musings such as daydreaming, random thoughts, and occasional insights, and a welcome opportunity to think for oneself (Stephenson, 1967, 1973; Logan, 1991, 2022).
Using Huizinga’s (1950) description of play to explain the phenomenon, Stephenson noted its consistency in subsequent Q studies. These studies suggested that play was omnipresent (for some) in the dynamics of media engagement and experiences, such as reading a newspaper, watching broadcasts, or routine shopping behaviors (Stephenson, 1967, 1974; Logan, 2022).
Importantly, Stephenson did not challenge the prevailing construct of information gain and assessing evidence-based constructs. Instead, he suggested that ideas derived from consumers and Gestalt psychology provided alternative explanations, insights, hypotheses, and expectations about mass media engagement.
I will eschew additional details since others have elaborated on Stephenson’s ideas and scholarly impact in science, psychology, and communication (Brown & Brenner, 1972; Brown, 1972, 1980; Good, 2010; Rhodes, Thomas, & Ramlo, 2022). Smith (1999) notes the specific contributions of Stephenson’s innovative ideas and approaches to the history of 20th-century psychology. I have also written about Stephenson’s ideas (Logan, 1991, 2003, 2022).
However, in terms of his mentorship, Stephenson fits all the elements of Patterson’s depiction of a scholar (as opposed to a researcher). Working with and reading Stephenson was a persistent challenge in critical thinking and finding commonalities among an array of conflicting ideas and experiences. While helping me understand the value of appreciating scholarship, his ideas imparted a groundwork that helped me think conventionally and unconventionally.
About a decade after the Brent Books experience, Stephenson provided a second intellectual deluge. In contrast, he provided a foundation equipped with strategies that helped me learn how to create knowledge. As he once told me, “Robert, to get the big picture, you need to step outside of the frame.”
To be continued… 21st-century career developments and influences in Part II.
References
Brown, S.R. (1980). Political subjectivity: Applications of Q methodology in political science. Yale University Press. https://qmethod.org/portfolio/brown-1980-political-subjectivity/
Brown, S.R., & Brenner, D.J. (1972). Science, psychology, and communication: Essays honoring William Stephenson. Teachers College Press.
Brown, S.R. (1972). A fundamental incommensurability between objectivity and subjectivity. In: Brown, S.R., & Brenner, D.J. Science, psychology, and communication: essays honoring William Stephenson. Teachers College Press, p. 57-94.
Good, J.M. (2010). Introduction to William Stephenson's quest for a science of subjectivity. Psychoanal Hist. 12(2), 211-41. doi: 10.3366/pah.2010.0006. PMID: 20845572.
Huizinga, J. (1950). Homo ludens. Beacon Press.
https://stuartbrent.com/pages/about-stuart-and-the-brent-family. Retrieved June 19, 2024.
https://americanwritersmuseum.org/stuart-brent-books-a-memory/. Retrieved July 9, 2024.
https://journalism.missouri.edu/2012/04/joye-patterson-remembered-as-innovator-in-the-field-of-science-journalism-at-mu/
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