On National Teacher Day, meet the 2024-25 Kenan Fellows
Research Overview
1. Agenda
• Syllabus
• What is communication or media research
• Scientific communities
• Qual/Quant research
• Evaluating resources
• Research search process
C1
2. Intros
• First or preferred name
• Department, School or College
• Animal you would like to be reincarnated as
• What food do you miss from home
3. Exercise
• What would you like to understand more fully?
• What are you curious about?
• What phenomenon in the world around you has
you curious about its cause, process or outcome?
5. Discussion
• What do you know about media or communication
research?
• What questions do you have about media or
communication research?
• Why do you want to study communication research
methods?
• What are ways you think might use the information from
this course, after you graduate?
9. Ways of Knowing
• Scientific community
• Similar education
• Similar professional backgrounds
• Read same technical literature
• Drawn many of the same lessons from it
• Commit to rules and standards of
scientific practice
10. Scientific Communities
• Shared assumptions
• Knowledge must be endorsed by community
• Young scientists learn also through application,
not explicit teachings
• Young scientists and outsiders struggle to
challenge status quo
13. 3. Quant vs Qual
• Reliability, validity,
generalizability
• To measure
relationships among
variables, test
hypotheses,
prediction/control/ra
ndom sampling
• Directing attention,
organizing
experiences,
authenticity
• To describe,
understand, and get
close to
people/objects they
study
14. Qualitative Research
• When you want to know a lot about a small unit
• Where not much is known about the topic
• Where the topic is private
• Where the topic is something you are (or can be)
involved in
• When the topic is something you have access to
• When you have a desire to make the strange familiar
or the familiar strange
15. Quantitative Research
• When you want to know something about a lot of
people
• When you want to generalize from your sample to
a large group/many
• When you want to identify concepts that predict
variations in a dependent variable
16. Qual Tools
• Ask people
• Watch people
• Try to live in the world they
live in
• Observe/Participate/Intervi
ew
• Review documents
• Gather life histories
• Look at your own life
• Research is data collection
instrument
• Field notes/Transcripts
• Narrative forms of coding
(and writing) data
17.
18. Quant Tools
• Statistical methods
• Experiments
• Surveys
• Questionnaires
• Measurement tools and
theory
• Secondary data analysis
• Control bias
• Theory testing
• Numerical Coding
19.
20. Discussion
• How is research like being a detective?
• What are the characteristics of research?
• How is research knowledge distributed?
• How do we “know” the things we know?
• What’s wrong with everyday ways of knowing?
• What do media or communication researchers,
do?
21. Evaluating a Source
• Is this a primary source or secondary source?
• Is it an academic or commercial source?
• What is the method? Is it sound? Is it recent/up-to-
date?
• What is the author’s background/qualifications?
• What is the reputation of the publication?
23. Primary Research
• Google Scholar
• http://staff.lib.msu.edu/junus/libs/gso.html
• Topic search engines
• http://www.lib.msu.edu/resources/articles.jsp
• PsychINFO, MEDLINE, Comm & Mass Media Complete
• Research journal title
• http://www.lib.msu.edu/
• eBooks
• http://www.lib.msu.edu/research/findbooks.jsp
• Illiad
• http://interlib.lib.msu.edu/illiad.dll
24. Exercise
• Go through journals
• Identify articles that look interesting
• Are they applied or theoretical?
• Are they about: Organizations? Media?
Healthcare? Interpersonal?
• Come up with a master list of topics by area
• Read the abstracts: What do we know from
these?
25. Teams
• TEAM 1
• Tony
• Kevin
• Zhao
• TEAM 2
• Jian
• Miho
• Ruizhi
• TEAM 3
• Botum
• Maneth
• Yining
• TEAM 4
• Ryan
• Xiaoyu
• Jianhong
Ask students to introduce themselves, giving their names and one unusual bit of information.
Choose a common theme: ask students to reveal what food from home they won’t miss, childhood injury, the kind of animal they would like to be reincarnated as, or their favorite movie.
First, play a name game that requires students to memorize the names of all the other students in the class.
2. Have students say their names each time before they speak, and continue the discussion by calling on another student by name.
Diverse students with a diverse skillset with diverse expectations
students free write for 5‐7 minutes in response to the questions
Explain that they can write about both communication issues (e.g., self‐disclosure) and non‐communication issues (e.g., inequality of pay).
Tell them to conclude with a set of questions about their ideas if they have time.
Finally, ask for volunteers to share their ideas. Select one that is about communication and facilitate a brainstorm about issues related to that area of interest (i.e., subcomponents, related variables, possible causes, and possible outcomes). Once you have all their ideas on that topic on the board, show them how these items might be connected in specific research questions. Then explain how the questions connect variables that might be researched in communication.
Brainstorm more than one topic if you have time.
At the close of class review the three exercises indicating that the name game required the ability to memorize,
the free write indicated that they were all curious, and that the analysis of each brainstorm showed
their ability to think critically
Math/statistics anxiety
Relevance research skills to your profession
Understanding research
Experiential Learning
Application of material to personal experience
Spaced repetition
Material spaced in small chunks
Building on itself
Multiple passes
You are learning a new language. Very few people understand the language we speak.
PhD??/
You will cite mostly scientific evidence. Primary evidence. This is original work carried out by an auther and that has been subjected to peer-review. What is peer review?
SHOW THEM AT ARTICLE
Timely review
2-3 readers review it. Only 5% accepted with minor revisions… And 5% editor rejected. Referees are often picked because of methodological experience and references. Asked to review for friends.
Public Opinion Quarterly 50% of the RRs are rejected.
If you see a lot of pages…. Don’t get down… most often there is a relationship between length and promise of manuscript.
Similar language because as a collective we build knowledge. It can not be done by itself
You identify a journal to understand what community of scholar you want to be a part of .
Graduate education is about socialization, learn through conducting research and scientists saying what is right and what is wrong. It is difficult to discover the rules of normal science. My job is to transfer unwritten rules.
Methods are the most unwritten rule driven part of the process
One tenet of theory is referred to as intersubjectivity… you are essentially defending your decisions
Social dynamics facilitate and inhibit criticism. Studies that do no reach significant results are often not published.
Textbooks are pedagogic vehicles for perpetuations of normal science. Must satisfy select individuals but must be socially accepted by the community.
Most science is concerned with prediction. Two distinct goals of science predication and understanding. In order to predict, you have to exclude certain phenomena to precisely identify that is the cause. Over-simplication is necessary.
It is knowledge about the interaction of unites in a system. Little analysis is on the analysis of the processes that produce that outcomes being studied. Versus a model focus on outcomes. Understanding why certain events have taken place.
Gives rise to paradoxes. The precision paradox: Why can we achieve precision in prediction without any knowledge of how the predicted outcome was produced.
Power paradox: Why can we achieve powerful understanding of social behavior without immersing ourselves in certain situations.
Leaning more quant or qual? Turnbull: Qual focuses on developing theory from data. How social experience is created and given meaning… observers of behavior. Authencity… social constructivist, ethnography-observing participants and communities… (journalism). Participant observation, case study, interviewing,
People believe that observing people in their natural environment is more accurate
Ethnography Direct observation that leads to thick description of people & culture.
Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodologist do not simply record behavior, but the have to make sense of it. Convict code
Preserve form and content of human behavior, represent different world views, create knowledge and meaning,
Subject the world to statistical transformations, predict and control, e
Validity
Like ambiguity and complexity;
Like to ask questions;
Like to interact/be with people;
Like to analyze immediate experience;
Fantasizes about what goes on behind people’s windows/phone calls;
Concentrates of episodic, emotional aspects of social life;
Like to simplify, organize, manage the world,
categorize the world;
Like math and formulas;
Usually think there’s a separate, objective reality to be captured;
Concentrate on rational, patterned order of social life;
Write in authoritative, declarative sentences.
How would one assess the quality of a journal???
ISI
Specialized journals
Identify five journal articles related to a research topic area of interest
