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Tuesday, March 29, 2016 Week 1 Lecture 1 - March 29, 2016 - Communication 88: Communication Research Methods • Review of basics and course objectives - Preparation for the major - Preparation for consuming (and creating) knowledge - Marketing and Entertainment - Ways of Knowing • Some “Truths” — How do you know - Ex: “Vegetables are good for you” • Mom and dad tell us, professional advice from doctors and nutritionists, teachers, government sponsored programs • Personal experience - particular health outcomes (losing weight, acne, constipation) - Tricky… how can you definitely know the outcome was due to eating vegetables Lecture 2 - March 31, 2016 - Ways of Knowing • Some “Truths” — How do you know - Ex: “People who are similar to each other tend to link each other” • Learned in Comm. 1 from professor and textbook Observing other groups of friends or your own experiences with friends • - Are these ways of knowing good or bad • Epistemology: the study of knowledge - Some “everyday” Ways of Knowing (and their problems) 1 Tuesday, March 29, 2016 • Method of tradition/tenacity (same thing, do not distinguish them) - Tradition (Thanksgiving; family tradition) • Truth that we take as knowledge is handed down over time (we may not even know where it stemmed from) - You know it’s true because it’s always been seen as true - Tenacity • Continuing or persisting to exist, determination - Commonly agreed way of doing things, unnecessary to change • Ex: lawyers and the court look at previous cases, use of the Constitution - Downside: may not be true or effective knowledge, must be open to overturning knowledge • Ex: waiting to get in the pool for an hour after eating - Handed down knowledge thought of as something to be true • Method of authority - We know something is true because somebody with credibility/authority tells us it is true (relying on an organization or an individual that we think should know) • Upsides: - Good way of receiving information from a credible source - Don’t have to take the time to figure something out ourselves - Can get all of the information you need from one place/person • Downside: - Credible sources still can be wrong - *Problem with BOTH methods of tradition/tenacity AND authority: authorities and handed-down truths can be WRONG* • Method of experience/observation - “See it to believe it” - it’s true because I witnessed/experienced it myself 2 Tuesday, March 29, 2016 • Surface-level version: Personal experience - Connecting causality of something in our brains (experiencing a stomach ache after going to a restaurant) • Problems: - Difference between correlation and causation - you don’t necessarily know it was causation (correlation = existence of a relationship or connection, causation = one thing makes the other thing happen) • More rigorous version: “Baconian empiricism” - Research studies with data in them (data = observations) - Empiricism: trying something ourselves to understand/observe it (when a mother tells a child not to touch the stove, the child touches the stove) • Problems: - Inaccurate observation (ex: mom says a woman’s hair is strawberry-blonde but you claim it was auburn) - Selective observation (ex: selectively picking out a car because you have interest in it and claiming you see these specific cars “everywhere”… also noticing patterns and things that don’t match those patterns) • Method of intuition/logic - Opposite of observation; you reasoned it out • Surface-level version: Common sense (DUH Way of Knowing) - “Of course people who are similar to each other like each other… DUH!” - Obvious, apparent, reasonable assumption • Problems: - Illogical reasoning (we often make leaps where we shouldn’t make leaps… making causation when in reality there are other possible explanations) - “Gambler’s Fallacy” = “I have a better chance of winning because I’ve been losing” 3 Tuesday, March 29, 2016 • More rigorous version: “Platonic idealism” - If A = B and B = C, then A = C • Problems: - Incorrect premises… what if A actually does not = B Where are the premises from - Fish swim, Kim Kardashian swims, therefore Kim Kardashian is a fish • Problem for ALL OF THE ABOVE everyday ways of knowing (methods of tradition/tenacity, authority, experience/observation, and intuition/logic): - Overgeneralization • One instance of something and you automatically generalize it as a pattern - Ex: one crime occurs at a mall and you think it happens all the time - Everyday ways of knowing can lead to conflicting ideas about “truth” • Ex: long-distance relationships - “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” OR “out of sight, out of mind” • The Scientific Method - Combines “platonic idealism” (logic/intuition —> constructing theories) with “baconian empiricism” (observation/experience —> gathering data) - Communication Science: Use empirical observations to test theories about communication processes - Unique Characteristics of Science (how is “science” different from the other “everyday” ways of knowing) • Scientific research is public - Published in peer-reviewed journals Reviewed with no guarantee to get published; logic/data is scrutinized and • may be outright rejected - Opportunity to replicate studies 4 Tuesday, March 29, 2016 • Since it’s out in publications, other scientists try it out and no one can replicate the study/experiment - Either it was a faulty finding or the original publicist lied… embarrassing! • Science is empirical - Conscious, deliberate observations • The studies are deliberately set-out in a way that we have control over what we are looking at - MANY observations • More observations and more studies on the same thing; solves the over- generalization problem • Science is “objective” - Control/remove personal biases - Explicit rules, standards, and procedures Section - March 31, 2016 - Brainstorming paper ideas: • Anonymity • Effects of college on relationships • Communication/relationship length on Tinder - Online/offline dating • Effects of the media on communication • Communication between people of different countries/origins - How to minimize effects of problematic communication • Communication within familial contexts (parent to child interactions) - Child order and parental communication - how it varies and what are it’s effects • Change in online dating over time • Self-presentation on social media 5 Tuesday, March 29, 2016 • Positive/negative effects that social media can have on eduction -General review of lecture notes 6