Applied Mass Communication Theory

A Guide for Media Practitioners

Jack Rosenberry, Lauren A. Vicker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000453614
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its third edition, this dynamic textbook blends coverage of the major theories and research methods in mass communication to enable students to apply their knowledge in today's media and communication careers.

Maintaining a focus on modern professional application throughout, this text provides chronological coverage of the development and use of major theories, an overview of both quantitative and qualitative research methods, and a step-by-step guide to conducting a research project informed by this knowledge. It helps students bridge their academic coursework with professional contexts including public relations, advertising, and digital media contexts. It provides breakout boxes with definitions of key terms and theories, extended applied examples, and graphical models of key theories to offer a visualization of how the various concepts in the theory fit together.

Applied Mass Communication Theory's hybrid and flexible nature make it a useful textbook for both introductory and capstone courses on mass communication and media theory and research methods, as well as courses focused on media industries and professional skills. Instructors can access an online instructor's manual, including sample exercises, test questions, and a syllabus, at www.routledge.com/9780367630362

Chapter 1

Theory and the Study of Communication

DOI: 10.4324/9781003121695-1

The starship Enterprise, answering a distress call from another vessel, finds itself in danger from a rogue energy field that has already destroyed one ship as the Enterprise crew watched, and is now coming perilously close to the Enterprise itself:

CHIEF ENGINEER SCOTT: There’s just no way to disrupt a gravimetric field of this magnitude. …

ENSIGN DEMORA SULU (INTERRUPTING): Hull integrity failing.

SCOTT: … But I do have a theory.

CAPTAIN KIRK: I thought you might.

From the opening scene of Star Trek: Generations

(Berman, Moore, & Braga, 1994)

This chapter will:

• Describe how theory contributes to the development of knowledge
• Introduce different types of theory, both the social scientific approach and alternative ways of theorizing about communication
• Describe some of the common goals and functions for theory, as well as evaluation criteria that can be used to judge whether a theory is worthwhile.

As human beings, we all know a great many things, especially taking into account the flexible meanings of the words “to know.” We commonly say we know someone who is a friend or acquaintance. We know what types of foods we prefer, and which ones we don’t like. We know basic intellectual concepts (such as 2 + 2 = 4) and more complicated ones. We know personal data about ourselves and others, such as ages or birthdays, and we know general facts about the world around us, such as the names and activities of celebrities who interest us. We also know how to do things, from shooting a basketball to driving a car to solving mathematical equations to writing a paper for a class.

These examples should show that knowledge is a complicated and wide-ranging thing. In fact, there is a formal way of exploring and explaining the quest for knowledge, called epistemology. Varied definitions for epistemology can be found, but they all involve the nature and scope of knowledge and how people validate or justify what they know or believe. A simpler definition would be that epistemology is how we come to know things, or how we acquire knowledge.

Theory, Research, and Knowledge

Such questions about acquiring knowledge lie at the heart of a book about theory and research. This is because knowledge, theory, and research are closely related; theory coupled with research can create new insights and extend knowledge in any field, including media and communication. The general process of developing theories and using research to explore and validate them is the same in any discipline, from medicine to physics to psychology to anthropology. The same is true in communication as an academic discipline; theory and research are fundamental to understanding details of how people communicate. The Introduction to this book gives an example of using global climate change theory as a tool for gaining greater knowledge about changes in the environment, quite literally. More generally, what is a theory, and how can theories be applied for a better understanding of the world around us?

Defining Theory

Theory is a common word, and most people have at some point in their lives learned about theories, especially in the natural sciences. For instance, most people have at least heard of the “Big Bang” theory in astronomy. Other common natural science theories are Darwin’s theory of natural selection (or evolution) in biology and Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics.

One thing all of these theories have in common is that they attempt to explain something about the world around us by answering a question:

• How did the universe come into being? The Big Bang supplies one possible explanation.
• How did various species of plants and animals arise? Darwin tries to offer an answer.
• How are energy (e) and matter (m) related to one another and what predictions can be made about what happens when one is converted to the other? Albert Einstein’s famous equation of e = mc² seeks to explain these relationships.

In mass communication, some theories seek to explain what happens when, for example, some topics get more coverage in the news than others, or what happens when audiences are exposed to certain content such as graphic violence or sexuality on television, in movies, or in music recordings. Others examine general impacts of media on society overall. Several chapters of this book explore these theories individually and describe in detail what they are meant to predict and explain.

Trying to find a single, formal definition for theory is not easy because many such definitions exist. They range from very simple to very complex ones, depending on the source and the author. Whatever the approach, definitions of theory share some common themes:

• Theories seek to answer questions about how certain things are related to one another.
• Answers to these questions offer explanations or predictions about how some aspect of the world works.

As researchers Kerlinger and Lee put it, “The basic aim of science is to explain natural phenomena. Such explanations are called theories” (Kerlinger & Lee, 2000, p. 11).

So, does Scotty have a theory that will save the Enterprise? Not really. What he has is a hypothesis – an idea that he thinks might work, and wants to test. (His hypothesis, as it plays out in the movie, is that a release of antimatter can disrupt the dangerous energy field and save the Enterprise. It does work; the ship is damaged but survives – so his hypothesis was proven correct.) Defining a theory as something that predicts and explains how certain phenomena are related to one another means Scotty’s idea can’t be called a theory (Box 1.1). The distinctions between theories and hypotheses, and also how they are related to each other, are discussed in Chapter 7.

Box 1.1

Definition of Theory

Theory: A statement that predicts or explains how certain phenomena are related to one another.

Types of Knowledge

Theory and research are associated with what is called scientific knowledge, which is a specific way of knowing things about the world around us. The important words in that description are way of knowing, which goes back to the question asked in the first paragraph of this chapter and the examples there (Box 1.2).

Those examples that open the chapter illustrate two important “ways of knowing,” namely experience and authority. Experience is learning from something by directly participating in it, while authority is learning something by taking someone’s word for it. People who attend a sporting event know firsthand who won the game and what the key plays or moments were (experience), but anyone who wasn’t there can see a news report about it after to find out the same information (authority). Because we can be in only once place at a time, however, most of what we come to know about the outside world does rely on authority. People know who won the last presidential election, but not because they counted all the ballots personally. Instead, the knowledge comes from authoritative sources: Election officials who tallied the votes and news media that reported the results. Most of what students learn in school has the same basis, coming from resources (textbooks and other readings) and teachers that are, presumably, authorities on the topics.

Knowing that you prefer pizza to sushi (or vice versa), on the other hand, is purely experiential; so is riding a bike. Learning by doing is the only way to acquire that knowledge. Learning to drive a car or play a sport also comes mostly through experience (practice), although this knowledge also may come in part from the authority of a classroom teacher in a driver’s education course or a coach who helps the athlete learn helpful techniques.

As useful and valuable as these ways of knowing are, a third way of gaining knowledge is the most important for our purposes here. This is scientific knowledge, which is defined as learning through systematic, accurate observation of evidence in such a way that it can be verified and validated. This type of knowledge is embodied in the scientific method: Defining a problem or question to be answered, investigating it by collecting evidence, and evaluating the evidence to determine the answer to the question. This approach is taught to most people in elementary school or high school, often accompanied by application of the principles with simple experiments in classes such as earth science, biology, or chemistry.

Box 1.2

“Ways of Knowing”

Experience: Learning something by firsthand participation.

Authority: Learning something by taking someone else’s word for it.

Research: Learning through systematic, accurate observation of evidence in such a way that it can be verified and validated.

Communication Theory Genres

One common way of studying communication practices has its roots in the scientific method, as described above. This style of developing knowledge draws heavily on observing parts of communicative processes that can be measured with some of the tools that are discussed in Chapter 8, using a technique called the positivist approach or “communication science” (Chaffee & Berger, 1987). Because communication processes and impacts happen in many ways that cannot be precisely measured, this is not the only way scholars seek to learn more about communication. Some of the other ways of researching communication topics are discussed in Chapter 9.

Communication Science

When most people hear the word “science,” they think about the natural sciences, which are disciplines that seek to explain the physical world around us. “Science,” however, is more than biology, chemistry, and physics. Communication theory belongs to a different set of disciplines called social sciences, or fields of study that explore how people behave within societies by using the scientific method to study social phenomena (Box 1.3). The social sciences include economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, to name just a few.

Studying communication as a human activity has been defined as a discipline that “seeks to understand the production, processing, and effects of symbol and signal systems by developing testable theories that explain phenomena associated with production, processing and effects” (Chaffee & Berger, 1987, p. 17). In other words, theory and research can be used to develop knowledge about the processes and effects of communication by observing and verifying measurable evidence. This is done at various levels including interpersonal, group/organizational, and mass mediated communication. Many of the original theories of mass communication as described in Chapter 2 are rooted in this style of research, as are most of the theories of the “effects tradition” described in Chapters 3 and 4. This style of investigating communication has its roots in other social sciences that use many of the same research techniques and tools, notably sociology and psychology. In fact, the first scholars in the emerging field of communication studies in the early 20th century were mostly sociologists and psychologists. Their contributions are described in Chapter 2.

Box 1.3

Definition of Social Sciences

Social sciences: Fields of study that seek to explain how people operate within societies by using careful research to study social phenomena.

Interpretive Theory

The other major way of learning more about communication processes and effects focuses on interpretation of texts and human actions. Rather than gaining knowledge or developing meaning from measurable observations, this research tradition uses the words or other symbols themselves as well as the symbols’ context and the scholar’s own understandings of other texts and contexts to determine meaning. (It should be noted that in this context the word “text” does not necessarily mean words on paper or a screen; a “text” could be an ancient culture’s picture drawings or a modern culture’s films or advertisements.)

Scholars from this tradition tend to think empirical science-styled theory is too simplistic. In the view of interpretive theorists, use of quantitative data and scientific method to investigate how people communicate does not allow the researcher to do anything other than measure certain aspects of behavior. But interpretive scholars are interested in broader understandings, and they think that just measuring something narrowly cannot help in understanding why or how certain behavior occurred or what its implications are. This is because the measurement...