A study of communicability is best known as a Q study because it follows the theories and methods of William Stephenson (1953). The student of communicability asks questions including,

• What is the range of communicated ideas in a particular discourse?
• What are the prevalent variations in it?
• How do these variations logically relate to each other?

While there are more formal ways to express them, these three questions underlie a Q study. It has five major parts:

• Collecting a discourse from people involved in it;
• Selecting a sample representative of the range of communicated ideas in the discourse;
• Selecting respondents from among people involved in the discourse and asking them to arrange the sample of ideas in their preferred order of importance;
• Formally comparing these arrangements provided by the respondents by factor analysis;
• Analyzing the results of the factor analysis and other information gathered from the respondents.

Datasets

* Q Studies Open Datasets