hniques, seeking to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency, of certain more or less naturally occurring communication in the social world (Lindlof, 1995).
In other words, the focus in naturalistic research in communication is not on replicability and generalizability so much as it is upon significance, meaning, and importance of communication in a naturalistic setting. An example of naturalistic research can be found in Shepardson and Britsch's (2000) study of the value of children's drawing and writing in science and its potential for helping children communicate their understanding. On this study, children were merely observed by the researcher who sat in on classes in which children created their own journal pages. The researcher recorded behavior and communications during the project and used these to discover themes representing various understandings children had of science and the ways they set about communicating their understandings.
One point that should be emphasized here is that rhetor
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