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.