Professional Documents
Culture Documents
What Is Research?
What Is Research?
○ Live within a group and attempt to gain insight into the culture; focus on ordinary
behavior that group members take for granted and find hidden meanings and
unwritten rules.
● Discourse/Conversational Analysis
○ Examine what people “say” to discover rules, strategies for interacting.
○ Examples:
■ Study the structure of interpersonal arguments among relational partners
■ How do speakers negotiate power relations using interruptions, leading
questions, and challenges?
■ How do speakers display their social identities and membership in a
speech community?
Quantitative Communication Research
● Surveys
○ Assessment of self-reported data
○ Examples:
■ Analyze surveys regarding which candidate people think won a political
debate.
■ Assess surveys of how relational partners handle conflict.
■ Assess the relationship between communication apprehension and
procrastination.
● Observation
○ Direct observation of behavior
○ Examples:
■ Observe small groups to discover what things they say may predict who
becomes a group leader
● Content and Interaction Analysis
○ A systematic quantitative examination of messages (films, speeches, etc.) by
determining the frequency of specific ideas, concepts, or terms.
○ Examples:
■ Study the amount of violence on children’s TV programs
■ Amount of newspaper space dedicated to stories about a particular issue or
movement
■ Frequency of “attacks” in political advertising
● Experimental Methods
○ Study the relationship between variables by manipulating the independent
variable
○ Examples:
■ Study the impact of evidence by exposing one group to a speech with
evidence and another group to one without
■ Study the effect of color in advertising by exposing one group to an ad
printed in color and another group to an ad without color