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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.
List of 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
About the author
Donald Treadwell earned his master’s degree in communication from Cornell University and his
PhD in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He developed and taught communication research classes in classroom and online settings
and also taught courses in organizational communication, public relations, and public relations
writing. He is the coauthor of Public Relations Writing: Principles in Practice (2nd ed., Sage,
2005).
He has published and presented research on organizational image, consumer response to
college names, health professionals’ images of AIDS, faculty perceptions of the communication
discipline, and employers’ expectations of newly hired communication graduates. His research
appears in Communication Monographs, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Public
Relations Review, Journal of Human Subjectivity, and Criminal Justice Ethics.
He is professor emeritus, Westfield State University, and has international consulting experience
in agricultural extension and health communication.
Summary
Teaching students the basics of communication research in an accessible manner, this fourth edition demystifies the theories and applications through its focus on methods in practice.
