Student Column: Choosing a Research Approach

by Diana Nastasia, U of North Dakota and Sojung Claire Kim, U of Wisconsin-Madison

School has started or the beginning of school is already in sight for many student members of ICA.

With this, concerns about research arise. What constitutes good research? What kind of research should I do? How do I choose an appropriate research approach? This is a question that many graduate students have asked their professors and have often asked us to address in an article.

Responding to this request, we have compiled a list of strategies that might be useful in selecting your own way of doing research:

• Reflect on who you are and what you bring to research, on your experiences, and on your beliefs.
• Reflect on the groups and communities that you belong to or used to belong to, and on their social and communication practices.
• Read the scholarly literature and examine what others have pursued in research - their ideas and perspectives.
• Brainstorm for research topics that emerge from your interests, can be useful to your groups and communities, and/or resonate with issues identified by other scholars.
• Assess what you would like to accomplish through research (support, reinforce, transform, or change a practice or perspective).
• Assess how the research you will start fits in the broader framework of your personal, professional, and societal endeavors.
• Choose research methods and procedures that are appropriate for your research interests, topics, and goals.
• Don't be afraid to mix methods and procedures, or even to try envisioning new ways of doing research.
• Always consider issues related to the ethics of research.
• Whenever possible, don't forget to offer the research back to the groups and communities that you have researched.

Dr. Robert Huesca from Trinity U, former chair of the Global Communication and Social Change division of ICA, offers this comment on his preference for a research approach:

"I employ the critical paradigm for my research. I find critical approaches more satisfying because of their attention to historical and contemporary context that shapes the conditions of production, circulation, and consumption in the communication process. I also come from a background in journalism and found that my skill set as a reporter were better suited to the field work of ethnographic methods and writing. I'm not hostile toward scientific and behaviorist approaches, but just find they don't really work for me."

We hope that our checklist and a scholar's advice will help students select the research approaches that are most meaningful to them.