Socio-Semiotics as a Journalism Research Method

Abstract

As it will be possible to observe, the confrontation between semiotics and sociology in the study of journalism should take on various shades of meaning. In the frst place, it is not pertinent to conceive a feld of study as a battlefeld in which diferent disciplines confront each other. On the contrary, there are many points in common between sociology and semiotics. In the second place, we should recall that one of the classic counterviews is that of quantitative content analysis, more characteristic of sociology, versus qualitative semiotics analysis. This confrontation is not new in the social sciences (Alvira, 1983). However, we should point out that we fnd ourselves facing a false dichotomy. The two methods are not incompatible, but rather complementary.