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The objective was to identify a very limited and carefully selected number of representative emergent telecommunication channels with emphasis on what the user--the congressman, staff person, or constituent--will see, rather than on the technology itself. Accordingly, the analysis drew substantially from authoritative secondary sources based on telecommunications research .41 already completed in the following areas, among others:

1.

2.

3.

Transmission technologies--electromagnetic spectrum, open wire pair, cable, microwave, laser/fiber optics, millimeter waveguide, satellite. Reception technologies--radio, broadcast and cable television, wall size TV screen, videocassette, electronic video recording, holography. Interface technologies--one-way origination: standard or solid-state TV camera, audiotape, videotape, film; two-way origination: telegraph, telephone, touchtone, picturephone, telefacsimile, interactive graphics, interactive television.

4. Teleprocessing technologies--remote access computer, time shared computer, minicomputer, programming language, communication computer, computer utility.

Various individual technologies were combined to create specific kinds

of communication channels.

Each kind of channel was then classified by

communication mode (person-person, person-stored information, person-machinestored information, person-machine-person, [person-machine]-[person-machine)], and by other channel characteristics such as communication level (one person

41Some examples are Walter S. Baer, Cable Television: Handbook for Decision-Making (Santa Monica, Ca.: RAND Corp., February 1973); Paul Baran, Potential Market Demand for Two-Way Information Services in the Home (Menlo Park, Ca.: Institute for the Future, December 1970); Edward M. Dickson, The Video Telephone: A New Era in Telecommunications (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Program on Science, Technology and Society, June 1973); Kas Kalba, ed., "The Cable Fable," special edition of Yale Review of Law and Social Action 2 (Spring 1972); James Martin, Future Developments in Telecommunications (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); National Academy of Engineering Committee on Telecommunications, Communications Technology for Urban Improvement (Washington, D.C.: NAE, June 1971); and Stanley Winkler, ed., Computer Communication: Impact and Implications (Washington, D.C.: First International Conference on Computer Communication, October 1972). Channel classification was based in part on Richard L. Meier, "Communications and Social Change," Behavioral Science 1 (January 1956): 43-58, and Noam Lemelshtrich, Design Analysis of A Home Terminal for Two Way Communications (New York: Center for Policy Research, February 1972).

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to-one, one-to-few, few-to-few, one-to-many, many-to-one), direction (one-way or two-way), dimension (audio, visual, digital, or hard copy), technical. feasibility, and economic viability.

Of course, there are many possible ways in which various transmission, reception, interface, and teleprocessing technologies can be combined to create different telecommunication channels. In fact, some channels could be configured from several different combinations of technology. For the purposes of this research, six specific channel configurations were selected as representative of important emergent channel characteristics: the teleconference, videoconference, videophone, cable TV, cable TV polling, and information retrieval. A major difficulty, as with the model-building, was to sort out the needed information from the almost overwhelming amount of data. Because of the tight linkages between technical and economic factors, on the one hand, and regulatory, institutional, and political factors on the other, it is easy to get bogged down. To simplify the analysis, the regulatory and other factors were considered to be generally outside the scope of study.

While the survey research methodology followed basically a nonexperimental exploratory field study approach using an interview survey of a Judgment sample of congressional offices, the actual development was innovative in at least two respects. First, the interdisciplinary systems model-building perspective was used as a framework for construction of specific research questions, design of interview instruments, and structuring of the sample. Second, the principal instruments were designed through an iterative process of pre-testing which resulted in the elimination of the standard interview schedule or guide and adoption of a pictorial and graphic approach.

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1. Member interview guide. Pre-testing of the member interview

42

guide with a series of open-ended questions," did not generate satisfactory data and proved especially deficient in establishing interviewee understanding of the emergent telecommunication alternatives. The final and ultimately successful form of the member interview guide was a set of sketches of future congressional-constituent telecommunications potential, as reproduced earlier in Figure Two.

This pictorial approach served to place the research within the frame of reference of the interviewees, without having to waste words and time or use any technological language. The response of congressmen was generally receptive to this interview approach, and seemed to confirm earlier findings that the journalistic or semi-structured approach is most effective for congressional interviewing.43 Good rapport with members was readily established, and as a result, through a process of dialogue, the yield of useful and candid data was relatively high.

Use of pictures was also intended to help minimize problems of validity which may occur when interviewing about subjects unfamiliar to the interviewee, and problems of response bias reflecting in part the respondent's

42Based on established procedures of interview guide design in, for example, Raymond L. Gorden, Interviewing: Strategy, Techniques, and Tactics (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1969); and Charles F. Cannel and Robert L. Kahn, "Research Methods: Interviewing," in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (Reading, Ma.: Addison-Wesley, 1968), pp. 526-595.

43Ralph K. Huitt and Robert L. Peabody, Congress: Two Decades of Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 28-34. See also Lewis Anthony Dexter, Elite and Specialized Interviewing (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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desire to please or perhaps disappoint the researcher.44

The sketches

provided a common focus of discussion, and in many interviews elicited a more or less "gut" response from the members. Congressmen were encouraged to give negative as well as positive reactions to the emergent channels, and to discuss possible problems as well as potential opportunities presented by

these channels.

use,

Of course, as with any research on perceptions of potential future the results can only be considered tentative. When ultimately faced with the real rather than just projected telecommunication alternatives, actual use may well differ from perceived use. A pilot demonstration or simulation of these future alternatives might be most desirable, although not feasible here. The sketches were designed to provide the next best approximation.

2. Staff interview guide. The member interview guide was also administered to all senior staff persons in the sample, but only after a detailed discussion with each staff person about the congressman's current constituent communication practices. The guide for this first part of the interview developed through several iterations and pre-tests into what is best described as a worksheet. Basically the worksheet provided an extensive list of constituent communication channels, along with various typical types of messages, as identified in the communication systems model-building. Staff persons were not asked to fill out the worksheet but only to use it as a discussion guide.

44See discussion in William F. Mason, Urban Cable Systems (Washington, D.C.: MITRE Corp., May 1972), p. V-12; and testimony by Weston E. Vivian in U.S., Congress, House Committee on Government Operations, Federal Information Systems and Plans, Hearings, before the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information, 93rd Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, April 1973), pp. 51-52.

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3. Data collection procedure. In selecting the sample of congressional offices (members and senior staff persons) for actual data collection, three factors were considered: definition of the sample, size of the sample,

and representativeness of the sample.45 The population universe included the 435 House offices from the 50 states. In regard to sample size, it

was chosen to be concurrently feasible in terms of available resources and adequate in terms of the research objectives. The exploratory nature of this

study precluded the necessity for a statistically representative sample, but did require that the sample be judgmentally representative on specified key

variables.

The

The initial sample size selected was 10% of the population universe (43 congressional offices), with an expectation that at least half and perhaps as many as three-quarters of the offices in the sample would participate. actual participation rate exceeded the most optimistic expectation. Forty of the 43 offices agreed to participate, with only two declining due to lack of time and other priorities (involving House leadership activities) and one selected out for personal reasons.

The type of sampling procedure used in this research is most accurately called a stratified judgmental procedure.46 The population universe was first

45See Delbert C. Miller, Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement (New York: David McKay, 1964), p. 46.

46 See Russell L. Ackoff, The Design of Social Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 124-25; and William A. Spurr and Charles P. Bonini, Statistical Analysis for Business Decisions (Homewood, Ill. Irwin, 1967), pp. 343-44. For a recent example of this sampling approach, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Rules and Administration, Automated Legislative Record Keeping for the Senate, a feasibility study by the Subcommittee on Computer Services, committee print, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 1972), pp. 257-65.