Empirical research skills
Doug Specht
Chapter from the book: Specht, D. 2019. The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Specht, D. 2019. The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide.
How might students carry out empirical research? This chapter looks at the process of a student designing their research before looking at a couple of the methods most commonly used, including key techniques, interviews, surveys, content analysis, digital ethnography, and some basic network analysis. The author explains the differences between research methods and methodologies and the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative research methods, the use of mixed methods and where digital methods can be deployed in the online world. Key elements of the four key practices of interviewing, surveys, content analysis and network analysis are described in sequence enabling the student to understand the parameters of each.
Specht, D. 2019. Empirical research skills. In: Specht, D, The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book42.l
This chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)
This book has been peer reviewed. See our Peer Review Policies for more information.
Published on Nov. 25, 2019