The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

A comparison is made between the tools of observation and research used by journalists to study society and the media, and the qualitative and clinical research tools used in the social and psychological sciences. The first part of the paper, a journalistic approach to sociology, traces the notion of the sociologist as a super-reporter using…