36G:323 COMMUNICATION RESEARCH METHODSFALL SEMESTER, 1997Class meetings: Tu
Th 1:05-2:20 106-BCSB |
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| This is one of two core courses for doctoral students primarily in Interpersonal and Small Croup Communication, the second being the course on Communication Theory in the Spring of 1998. The course normally introduces students to several of the methods commonly used in communication research and seeks to connect methods of data collection and analysis to methodological stance and to theoretical currents in the field. The particular goals of the class are (l) to make students more knowledgeable about particular methods yet (2) to see the research enterprise as a whole, rather than as composed of separate issues such as framing of research questions, and choices between possible methods of research. The course will also increase your familiarity with the different audiences reached by important journals in the field, and help you to consider the rhetorical implications of different audiences in choosing target outlets for your work. Finally the class will be focused on the design, conduct, and analysis of a research project of your own which will be presented to the class for development, report, and discussion. The intention is to provide you with some guided "hands on" experience that will become the basis for future conference presentations or publications. |
| The starting point for any research effort is to analyse the concepts that interest you. The analysis often is aided by becoming familiar with, and personally reflecting on, the previous contributions of other scholars so that you can visualize the topic and plan your approach in the knowledge of how it has previously been conceptualized -- even if you choose to do it a different way. Of course this sort of work connects you immediately to some "Big Questions" about the sort of activity in which you are engaged -- are you buying into a particular world view by focusing on certain sorts of questions, for example? The next stage is a careful and programmatic analysis of a means for achieving your goal of studying a topic. What means of handling the topic will be most productive? Such questions are rarely simply answered and one often has to trade off some things against others (for example, weighing convenience and cost against the approach to the issues that best reflects your style, or balancing the advantage of a one-shot study against the losses of information about real life contexts that influence the communication behaviors that you are intent on studying). A third element of the analysis, especially in a social scientific mode is ruling out alternative explanations for any findings that you uncover. Statistical procedures provide a standard way of ruling out the alternative explanation that your findings are pure chance, for example. But this aspect of the analytic issue is more subtle than just applying statistical techniques. It really cuts right to the roots of what we are attempting to do in studying communication: define, depict, analyse, and interpret what is going on. |
| The course will connect you
to these issues by building on what you already know about methods, exposing
you to some methods you do not yet know, and by giving you the chance
to try out a particular method by working on a specific research problem.
The endpoint of the course should be a paper that is at least suitable
for convention presentation and may provide you with the basis for publishable
work later on. You will actually gather data and will deal with some analytic
issues associated with that. Although I will be the instructor of record for this course, Professors Baxter, Fitch, and Hirokawa will also be involved in course instruction. |
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