COM 5312    
RESEARCH METHODS IN COMMUNICATION

Assignment 1 JOURNAL DESCRIPTION

Analyze a scholarly journal. If you wish to use a journal not discussed in class, be sure to get my approval. Address the following items/questions. If the journal does not provide specific information for a particular item, and you cannot make an educated guess based on other content, so state.

1. What is the name of the journal? If it has changed over time, how so?

2. Who is the publisher, owner, affiliation?

3. What are the annual publication dates/times of year?

4. What is the submission policy? Manuscript style? (Do not quote at length here; describe the policies in your own words).

5. What is the review policy/procedures? Is it a blind review process? How many reviewers are used? What is the time frame?

6. Who is the editor? For how long? Who was the previous editor? Is there a stated editorial policy? Is there an unstated editorial policy? Is the policy followed?

7. What are the general contents of the journal, i.e., book reviews, research briefs, cross-fire sections, letters, etc.?

8. What are the kinds of topics in the articles? What types of issues are studied and the types of methods used? Is there a pattern?

9. What changes do you note over time? Skimming issues and titles over a long period, do you detect any major changes in the journal - content, style, types of issues, methods, etc.? Do these correlate with major geo-political and social events of the times or changes occurring in the discipline?

10. What is your overall evaluation of this journal? What is its purpose, its reason for being and its justification? Why should anyone read it? Who is its audience? How well does it accomplish its goals?

Assignment 2 ARTICLE ABSTRACT

Find an empirical article in one of the journals. It needs to have a methods, results, and conclusions section to be empirical. Copy the article and turn in with your abstract.

Abstracts tend to be personal things. They are short form summaries of articles for your future use in papers, dissertations, etc. At a minimum, however, the abstract should cover the following points.

1. Full bibliographic citation. Authors, title, journal, year, volume, number, month, pages, etc. Be careful here. I don't know how many times I have had to go back to the journal because I didn't list authors first names and initials or something else similarly trivial but suddenly required by the style sheet of the journal I am writing an article for. Copy the citation exactly as it appears in the journal.

2. Statement of the problem to be investigated and a justification as to why it is an important problem.

3. Under what paradigm does this study fall -- quantitative/scientific? Or qualitative/interpretivist? Or qualitative/critical?

If it is quantitative, what is the central thesis, argument, or theory being put forward in this article? What is the point? What are the authors trying to prove? What is the argument behind their expectations (behind their hypotheses or research questions)? What hypotheses are being tested? Look carefully because there always is a viewpoint or logic being pushed, even if vaguely stated.

If it is qualitative, what questions are being explored? What theory is being developed?

4. Does the literature review seem complete and current? Does it support the hypotheses/questions being studied?

5. What methodology did they use -- qualitative, quantitative or both? Does the methodology seem appropriate to the questions being asked? Do the methods appear to be replicable, valid, generalizable?

5. What kind of analysis of the data did they perform? Do they seem appropriate to the data and nature of the study? What did the authors find? What were the results?

6. What do the authors conclude? Were their arguments supported; were their questions answered? How does this study extend the literature? Any notable limitations? Any important implications for future research?

7. So what? What do you think of this study? Any outstanding problems? Do you trust the conclusions? How might this study impact on your own research plans?

8. Be sure to turn in a copy of the article with your abstract.

Assignment 3 PROBLEM/PURPOSE STATEMENT AND JUSTIFICATION

The purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking about a research topic for your thesis or dissertation. It is part of the first chapter of your research proposal (your final paper.

1. What is the problem you wish to investigate? Why is it a problem?

2. Why is it an important problem? Why is it worth studying?

(Here you are providing a justification for your research. There are two justifications for spending the time and money on conducting research: either it is important for theoretical reasons -- you are testing, creating, or furthering theory, or it is important for practical reasons -- you are addressing and attempting to solve or better understand some socially relevant problem. Hence the distinction between theoretic vs. applied research. Many studies combine the two, i.e., applying theory to practical problems.)

3. Background. Give a short history of the problem area. How did it develop, what is it's current status, who has been studying it, etc.

4. Purpose/Research Question(s)/Study Goals (all these terms mean roughly the same thing). How are you going to approach the problem with your study? What do you hope to accomplish with your research towards addressing the problem? And, again, why is your approach an important one?; (i.e. justify your approach/goals/questions).

5. What literature(s) are you planning to review (or have you already reviewed) relevant to the problem.

Be as concise as you can. Talk to each other about your research interests; this will help you clarify your thoughts. You should be able to confine this assignment to 2-3 pages.

Assignment 4 HYPOTHESES & RATIONALE

The purpose of this assignment is to help you finalize your rationale and statement of specific hypotheses and/or research question. This section appears after the literature review in Chapter 2 of a thesis or dissertation. Sometimes it can be a separate chapter. It is the most important part of any research project. The whole point of research is developing and testing theory. Here is where you state your central thesis (based on the literature review) or theory, which is the argument leading to your hypotheses and/or specific research questions.

You should be reviewing the literature relevant to your study. That literature will support a line of argument(s) which is called theory. It should lead you to your own hypotheses.

For this assignment, follow the guidelines in the textbook as well as lecture notes. What you produce here will vary depending on the scientific or interpretivist nature of your research.

1. What are the specific hypotheses you wish to test? What are your study predictions? What specific questions do you wish to answer?

2. For each specific hypothesis, explain why you have that expectation. Why do you expect that relationship to be supported? What is the argument, logic, central thesis, or theory that leads to that expectation? What is the rationale for the prediction/expectation/hypothesis?

In the case of research questions, provide the argument for asking those particular questions. Why did you select the particular concepts/variables in each question?

3. How are your hypotheses and/or research questions new? In what way do they extend the literature/theory/state of knowledge?

4. How do your arguments (your rationale) connect to the literature you are reviewing? What's the link? You don't need to provide the literature review here but explain how the literature you have reviewed supports your arguments. (You will need to provide a literature review for the final paper).

Be as concise as you can. Talk to each other about your rationales; again, this will help you clarify your thoughts. You should be able to complete this assignment in 3-5 pages.

Assignments 5-7 ARTICLE CTITIQUES

For each of the article critiques do the following:

1. Locate an article which employs the assigned research design. Try to find one that is current and on a subject matter that is of interest to you.

2. Describe the overall purpose of the study.

3. Describe the research design used.

4. Given the design, describe the important critique points you should use in evaluating the study and its results (e.g., internal validity factors are important for experiments and any design testing causal hypotheses, while external validity factors are important for descriptive studies and any study wishing to generalize).

5. Briefly critique the study using these points.

6. Do you believe the design used is appropriate to the study's purpose? Why or why not?

Your critique should be 1-2 pages in length -- be concise and to the point, cut to the chase, don't beat around the bush, fish or cut bait, drain the swamp, get off the pot, ..... but I digress. Attach a copy of the article or the relevant sections of it.