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Communication Research

Communication Research. Week 5 What is research method and how do I write about it?. Methods – Initial Questions. What methods exist? What methods are appropriate for my Research Question? Will I be able to get the access I need? What skills do I need to develop to carry out my choice?.

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Communication Research

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  1. Communication Research Week 5 What is research method and how do I write about it?

  2. Methods – Initial Questions • What methods exist? • What methods are appropriate for my Research Question? • Will I be able to get the access I need? • What skills do I need to develop to carry out my choice? Communication Research

  3. Choice of Methods – Some Examples • Experiments • Cross-sectional surveys • Observation • Secondary analysis (e.g. official statistics) • Secondary analysis of documents • Interviews • Focus Groups • Case studies • Longitudinal research (e.g. time series or qualitative) • Content analysis Communication Research

  4. Learning the language of your Method • In quantitative research: • Never “Prove” something • “Reject or accept the null hypothesis” • Data supports the hypothesis • In qualitative research: • Don’t apologise that your case can’t be generalised to a population • You’re generalising to theory Communication Research

  5. Doing your chosen method “right” • Guidance from research methods texts • Guidance from journal articles • Within your subject area • Outside your subject area • Specialist methodology journals • Guidance from academic networks • Guidance from those whose work you’re citing Communication Research

  6. The Method Section of the Proposal & Report • Outlines specifically how research was undertaken and may include the following elements, depending on the type of research • Uses sub headings (unlike the introduction) • Is vital to enable readers to both understand how you conducted (or will conduct) your research and to enable them to judge the validity of your results or findings • This section uses direct and descriptive writing style Communication Research

  7. Overview/Preamble • Overview (also called Preamble) of the research methods and rationale behind the research • Can include information on the type of study, nature of study, time horizon, and units of analysis eg Two sets of groups were established from Communication students at the University of Western Sydney. Students discussed the same two questions on a real-time chat system and a bulletin board system. Communication Research

  8. Sample • Sample includes a description of the sample demographics/characteristics, sample size and any problems experienced/anticipated eg A total of 772 students participated in the study. Female to male ratios were 3:1 in the BA (Communication) subjects involved. Modal age range was 17-19 years. The participants who used the first set of discussions (using bulletin boards) were not involved in the second set (using real-time chat). Communication Research

  9. Materials/Instrument • Materials or Instrument describes any particular materials used eg test instrument such as a survey, observation schedule etc. • Also notes any other materials that may have been used such as a tape recorder eg The test instrument employed in this study was the Bales Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) Table 1 Bales IPA areas & categories Communication Research

  10. Procedure • Procedure identifies the steps or strategies used and any problems which arose eg Participants were randomly assigned to online groups, which varied in size (5, 7, 9 or 11 members). Sixty-four groups used the first in-house bulletin board system to discuss both topics; 29 real-time groups later used the real-time chat program, Internet Relay Chat (or IRC) with both topics. Asynchronous group duration was three weeks, real-time groups duration varied but was usually finalised within an hour. All participants needed to access the special computer facilities, which were only accessible through university computer labs.All of the groupsﾕtranscripts were electronically recorded and stored. The origin of the raw data for this study was the indexed transcripts for each computer-mediated group. • This section can be written in paragraph form or you could use numbers or bullet points to make it easier to read Communication Research

  11. Statistics • Statistics refers to the statistical analyis methods of analysis that you will use to analyse the data eg An ANOVA study was performed on the 12 Bales IPA categories with modality, size and topic as predictor variables. • In your proposal you might leave this out unless you know what they are. We will cover this later in the course. You should include this in your final report Method section Communication Research

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