Introduces students to key principles of design, sampling, reliability and validity, measurement, and hypothesis testing. Examines specific quantitative and qualitative research methods, including survey, experimental, content analytic, and observational designs. Emphasis is on design and execution of research for exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory purposes. Students also learn statistical procedures employed in analyzing data through an introduction to multivariate statistics and an overview of t-tests, analysis of variance, and multiple regression techniques. Provides students with an introduction to the major theories and concepts in the field of mass communication.
Attention is devoted to communication perspectives and to psychological perspectives.
Topics include determinants of mass media news, effects of television news, political advertising and debates, television violence effects, TV and children, media economics, and the sociology and psychology of the mass media audience. Advanced methods course on multivariate statistical methods used in analyzing research in human communication. Focuses primarily on understanding these methods and statistics rather than on their actual performance and calculation. Introduction to applied research methods in public relations, advertising, and media in relation to the nature of and relations between audience and media. Focuses on the design and execution of content analytic studies, including form vs. content variables, measurement issues, reliability and validity assessment, a systems view of research findings, computer text analysis programming, and traditional human coder techniques.