Full Description
Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry teaches students the basics of communication research in an accessible manner by using interesting real-world examples, engaging application exercises, and up-to-date resources. Best-selling author Donald Treadwell and new co-author Andrea Davis guide readers through the process of conducting communication research and presenting findings for scholarly, professional, news/media, and web audiences.
New & Key Features
New vignettes introduce a theoretical or methodological topic using language and contexts that students new to research can easily comprehend.
New and updated content includes:
"First Decisions": expanded discussion of basic research perspectives, worldviews, communication metatheories, and communication research traditions.
Bibliographic research: new content on identifying and assessing fake news.
Survey methodology: new content on "big data" and surveys.
Application exercises help students learn to make decisions about research practice.
Ethics panels with questions facilitate discussion of research ethics in practice.
Contents
1. Getting Started: Possibilities and Decisions
2. First Decisions: From Inspiration to Implementation
3. Ethics: What Are My Responsibilities as a Researcher?
4. You Could Look It Up: Reading, Recording, and Reviewing Research
5. Measurement: Research Using Numbers
6. Sampling: Who, What, and How Many?
7. Summarizing Research Results: Data Reduction and Descriptive Statistics
8. Generalizing From Research Results: Inferential Statistics
9. Surveys: Putting Numbers on Opinions
10. Experiments: Researching Cause and Effect
11. Quantiative Understanding of Content: Content Analysis
12. Qualitative Understanding of Content: Rhetorical and Critical Analyses, and more
13. Qualitative Understanding of Communication Behavior
14. Research Results In Print and Online: Writing and Presenting for Scholarly and Other Publics
