Methodology (summary Introducing Communication Research included)
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Course
Methodology
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Book
Introducing Communication Research
Lecture notes and seminars of methodology in the right order. This document also contains a summary of the book Introducing Communication Research, which covers material necessary for the weekly knowledge quizzes and final exam. Some topics are further explained in English.
Summary Methodology for Pre-Master CIS (all important theory exam!)
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Methodology
Chapter 1
Find a question of interest How to get the best answer? If you choose the
method you will make decision about the nature of human behaviour.
Communication research= systematic process of posing questions about human
communication, designing and implementing research that will answer those
questions. And then persuading other researchers that your research is valid.
1. Observations helps you to thinking about communication processes. 2. Also
theories about human behaviour will help (grandfather use twitter and sister
snapchat Young people are more likely to use snapchat than older people). 3.
Moving closer to your group of interest might lead to more insights. 4. Try to
finds underlying research.5. There is not one best position to studying behaviour.
Two characteristics of a scientific method (approach) are observation or
empiricism and the attend to rule out other explanations.
Readers and viewers can help with the advertisement effectiveness.
Content can tell us the effect in different ways. Rhetoricians= People who
are interested in the appeals or persuasive tactics an advertisement uses
to persuade an audience to adopt behaviour. They make appeals based on
logic, character and emotions (girl texting in car). Essentially qualitative
(analyse language). You also have Content analysis= Quantitative method
for assessing media content. Count the number of appearances.
Creators tell us decision making.
Interpersonal communication Change relationships.
Unavoidable decisions:
- Field of study: Wide – Narrow (small pieces of the problem)
- Researcher: Dispassionate – Involved
- Approach: Subjective – Objective
- Priority: Your questions (the participants have no influence in what to say
and what they have to do) – Their answers
- Sample: Large – Small
- Data: Qualitative – Quantitative (the understanding can be captured in
numbers).
Q-Methodology= Combine the respondents view of the world with quantitative
(computational) approaches to asses these views.
- Report: Subjective (including personal experiences and reactions) –
Objective.
Communication research have 3 main components:
1. Problem posing: Defining the question.
2. Problem solving: How best to answer it.
3. Peer persuasion: Publish research and convince others.
Exercise 1: Questions about media:
- When does a video go viral?
- What does the generic and brand name say about the credibility of news.
,- Why is there a difference in which people believe media platform they believe
to find news.
- How do trained journalists, dedicated newsrooms and professional standards of
a news source influence the credibility of a news source.
- Do brands influence their advertising to keep people buying their product?
- What is the relationship between brand name of a advertising company and
that people believe of them?
- How does online advertising content affects offline advertising content?
- How is the believe of someone in a news platform influences by their social
environment?
Lecture 1
Improve on what we already know. Describe the situation with different data.
Understand the underlying processes. What you see is the behaviour, but you
want to understand what makes them take. Understanding what happens.
Attempts to describe and explain situations and behavior Different types of
research questions.
Uses different types of data to do so Different types of research methods.
When do we ‘believe’ an explanation?
• Only if the research is reliable. Reliable: we want to see evidence. You persuade
people.
• Only if the research is valid. Valid: relate very closely to something we are
interested in.
• Always provisionally (someone might come up with a stronger explanation).
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be
perverse to withhold provisional assent’” Provisional assent: try and see and find
examples. Believe a lot less.
Seminar 1
Docent in DZ402
Difference between dependent and the independent variable (first
question)
Gender is mostly an independent variable. Age cannot be answered. In depends
on your conceptional model. How do you set up a study?
Behaviour is mostly dependent variable, because you cannot change is. Mostly
find for some of behaviour.
Difference between reliability and validity
Good or bad research question:
1. What is happiness? Too broad.
2. Which fruits do I have to grow in my garden Subjective, so wrong.
3. When can infants recognize faces
4. Is water necessary for human being Not good, because we already know.
5. What roles does peer socialization play in a child’s development?
6. Which country has the highest population density? Not good, because you
can look it up.
, Chapter 2
A theory of communication has to be supported by evidence. There are 3 thought
processes that link observations with theories.
1. Induction= Reasoning from observations to a theory that explain your
observations. Make theories that can offer the best explanations for an
observation. It helps you with the question. You see males are more likely to sit
with males, and females to sit with females. Students have a greater comfort
level with the same-sex than opposite-sex conversations.
2. Deduction= The other way around. Make a theory and design a study with
observations to test this idea. You want to know if this is true for the bigger group
and whether this is true over time/all times. Deduction helps you to support your
conclusion. It is more efficient than induction in that it leads to a specific
observation that will test your hypothesis (the statement about the relationship
you expect to find). Woman are more likely than man to discuss grades Design
a study and count the number of times words like ‘grade’ occur.
3. Abduction= Reason from an effect to possible causes. Find out which event
explains your observation.
Why? There are different purposes:
- Exploration: Curiosity (qualitative or quantitative). Hypothesis come later
after a basis of the statement what he expects to finds.
- Description: We want to answer the ‘why’ question, in fact we want to
know more.
- Explanation: Try to answer the ‘why’ question and have possible
explanations before the research begins.
- Prediction: Confirm a theory. We write hypothesis.
- Control: Predict and manipulate psychical processes. Hypothesis specify
only one influence.
- Interpretation: Place yourself in someone’s shoes, the ones who are
involved. Research questions are more focussed on language. These open
ended questions are more likely then hypothesis.
- Criticism: Try to explain in which way communication is used to exercise
and maintain. Start with general expletory questions or propose specific
hypothesis.
How? Methods and Epistemologies.
Communication researcher differ in method decisions: epistemology (how we
know that we know/how best to understand communication?). Ways of
understanding communication include: tenacity (done it to understood it that
way), intuition (gut instinct), authority (a credible source said so), rationalism
(logical) or empiricism (observation). Ontology= How to define
communication?
Scientific methods: openness (methods and data are open to everyone) and
self-correction (replicate a study).
People have different takes on what the purpose of research should be, which
shapes their approaches. Being aware of your own worldview allows you to
refine your research questions.
Worldview 1 (from Ancient Greek, nomos = law)
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