COMM 420 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Empiricism, General Idea, Research
Document Summary
Theory: statements about the supposed relations among abstracts concepts or variables. Concept: a general idea concerning the social world (happiness) Variable: a characteristic that varies or may vary between members of the same population. The chicken or the egg: deductive, relationship between variables is theorized based on general principled and knowledge about phenomena (things already known, research is used to test theory. Inductive: everything possible about phenomenon is studied. Indepth interviews: theory is developed from observations. What is communication theory: provide explanations for, and predictions about, communication phenomena and their effects, from an ad/pr perspective , we use theory to predict the way consumers and public are likely to react to campaigns. What do consumers want: educations, surveillance (watching the last episode of a season bc everyone would be talking about it, entertainment, para-social interaction (strong feelings towards characters, escape. Uses and grats methods: surveys, qualitative methods.
