Exam 2: Communication Research and Inquiry

You are a social scientist. Your believe that knowledge is advanced only when it serves to free people, your ontology argues that reality is the product of the interplay between structure and agency, and you believe that it makes no sense to keep values out of your work. You are a(n) ___________ researcher.

Communication research employs___________ (inquiry relying on the collection and analysis of numerical data) and___________ (inquiry relying on the collection and analysis of symbolic data such as language and other cultural products).

You cannot decide in this experiment how to measure the effect of your manipulation of the reward or punishment the children see in your cartoons. You are struggling with the question of ___________.

Experiments typically employ a(n) ________ group, participants who are not subjected to the experiment's manipulation of variables.

Social scientists recognize that it is close to impossible to keep values out of their inquiry. Some, then, embrace them as a natural part of humans doing human work. Others do their best to limit the influence of those values on their inquiry. They try to set them aside, or _________ them through how they conduct their work.

For critical researchers, what is real and knowable in the social world is the product of the interaction between structure (the social world's rules, norms, and beliefs) and ________ (how humans act and interact in that world).

____________ is a quantitative (numerical) textual analysis that depends not on researchers' deep reading, but on their objective categorization and accurate measurement based on their deep reading.

You are a social scientist. You believe that all knowledge is local, you believe that knowledge is best advanced through subjective interaction with other scholars, and you willingly accept the role of values in your work. You are a(n) ___________ researcher.

Which of the following is an example of a text that might be of interest to an interpretive researcher?

Researcher Janice Radway successfully mixed research methods and traditions in her study of the _____________.

Survey researchers sometimes present questions to __________ samples of respondents; that is, all population members have an equal likelihood of appearing in the sample.

The form of social science scholarship that is most closely aligned with the natural sciences in ontology, epistemology, and axiology is ___________ theory and research.

You have questions about a specific piece of research on conversations in the early stages of dating, so you decide to run that same study, albeit with a different set of young men and women. You are engaging in the scientific practice of _________.

The fact that theories are developed by people who have biases, interests, skills, and values means that they are___________.

In your TV violence experiment you show one group of children a cartoon in which a character is punished for hitting another character. A second group sees the same cartoon, but in this one the aggressive character is rewarded for hitting. This means that reward/punishment for aggression in cartoons is your ___________.

The fact that theories reduce the topics under investigation to categories, variables, propositions, and assumptions means they are ____________.

The ontology of the social sciences allows three discrete positions. One says the world is real, tangible, and measurable, existing apart from our efforts to study it. This is the ___________ position.

List and describe the three steps involved in scientific inquiry.

The epistemology of social science operates on a continuum between two positions. At one end is the position that the best way to generate and expand knowledge is through closing the gap between knower and known. This is the __________.

The fact that theories are always changing to meet not only the scientific advances of those who employ them, but to meet changing times and social conditions, means that they are ________.