Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research

Lawrence R. Frey, Kenneth N. Cissna, Lawrence R. Frey, Kenneth N. Cissna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135231781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research provides a state-of-the-art review of communication scholarship that addresses real-world concerns, issues, and problems. This comprehensive examination of applied communication research, including its foundations, research methods employed, significant issues confronted, important contexts in which such research has been conducted, and overviews of some exemplary programs of applied communication research, shows how such research has and can make a difference in the world and in people's lives.

The sections and chapters in this Handbook:

• explain what constitutes applied communication scholarship, encompassing a wide range of approaches and clarifying relationships among theoretical perspectives, methodological procedures, and applied practices
• demonstrate the breadth and depth of applied communication scholarship
• review and synthesize literature about applied communication areas and topics in coherent, innovative, and pedagogically sound ways
• set agendas for future applied communication scholarship.

Unique to this volume are chapters presenting exemplary programs of applied communication research that demonstrate the principles and practices of such scholarship, written by the scholars who conducted the programs.

As an impressive benchmark in the ongoing growth and development of communication scholarship, editors Lawrence R. Frey and Kenneth N. Cissna provide an exceptional resource that will help new and experienced scholars alike to understand, appreciate, and conduct high-quality communication research that can positively affect people's lives.

Part I
Foundations of Applied Communication Research

1
The Development of Applied Communication Research

Kenneth N. Cissna
University of South Florida

William F. Eadie
San Diego State University

Mark Hickson, III
University of Alabama at Birmingham

Applied communication research is a concept that emanated from the “speech” tradition in the communication discipline. Scholars working from the “journalism” tradition saw no need for such a concept because they assumed that all of their research necessarily had “applied” value. On the speech side of communication, the idea of doing “applied” research was a revolutionary one, a reaction in revolutionary times to what some saw as a hidebound conflict over control of the theoretical and methodological heart of the discipline. Indeed, the idea of “applied” took many forms and became a covering term for a number of research and professional agendas.

In this chapter, we trace the development of the concept of applied communication research primarily from a political and institutional standpoint. As this handbook illustrates, the terms applied communication and applied communication research have come to describe a number of strands of scholarship and to serve a variety of purposes. Any attempt to trace more fully the historical development and emergence of all of the various strands of scholarship; to provide details about the contents of the Journal of Applied Communication Research and other applied publications; to identify all significant applied communication scholars, teachers, and practitioners; to discuss the applied communication units of the various professional communication associations; or to compare various courses or curricula in applied communication, although undoubtedly worthy projects, is beyond the scope of—and the space allotted to—our chapter. Instead, this essay is informed not only by our research into the development of applied communication but also by our unique involvement in that process over more than 3 decades, including, especially, our perspectives as the first three primary editors of the Journal of Applied Communication Research (Hickson, 1973–1980; Cissna, 1981–1986; Eadie, 1990–1992).

We begin by delving into the evolution of the communication discipline to understand how the concept of “applied communication research” became a natural solution for a number of political tensions. Consequently, we start by reviewing how a group of teachers and scholars came to form the discipline, describe the struggles that early writers faced in defining the discipline and its scholarship, and show how the concept of research that could be called “applied” burst into consciousness in 1968. We continue by showing how the early development of the Journal of Applied Communications Research (JACR) capitalized on a newly found enthusiasm for doing socially relevant work, how the Applied Communication Section of the National Communication Association (NCA) aided the acceptance of the word applied, and how the purchase of JACR by NCA set the stage for “applied communication research” to mature.

Issues Influencing the Development of Applied Communication Research

Since the founding of the communication discipline, the field has coped frequently and repeatedly with four interrelated issues. These issues set a political agenda for the development of the communication discipline.

The first issue concerns the discipline’s search for respectability within the academy. Like many other “new” disciplines,¹ communication scholars struggled for respectability in both academic and public circles. In fact, the need to establish a separate academic unit in communication was driven largely by a desire to develop respectability within the university as teachers rather than as scholars. Founding a distinctive discipline was seen as a means by which communication scholars could gain some importance and not be dominated by former colleagues, mostly in English departments.

The second issue was the desire to build a research-based body of knowledge about communication. The belief that communication is both an important activity and a significant area of study has roots in the earliest philosophical writings of a variety of cultures. Attempts to describe what constitutes effective communication and the impact of such communication have survived from early writings as cultural knowledge, and basic courses in public speaking still rely to a great extent on teaching that received cultural knowledge rather than on a body of contemporary knowledge built from systematic research. Many successful attempts have been made to validate that cultural knowledge, however, and from those attempts, new knowledge and theory have been generated. Efforts to move beyond those basic principles to produce sophisticated understandings of message production and effects, the social and cultural generation of meaning, and the impact of communication technology have led to a growing body of specific knowledge. The extent to which this knowledge is distinguished from knowledge claims made by other disciplines sometimes is uncertain, however, and difficulty in making those distinctions has kept communication scholars from achieving the recognition that scholars from other disciplines have received.

The third issue involves the need to generate knowledge that contributes to solving social problems. Although communication scholarship has always exhibited a rather practical bent, often it has been directed more toward improving pedagogy than toward solving social problems. Furthermore, the scholarship of the field can be criticized as somewhat parochial, being created primarily for one’s colleagues and students. In recent years, however, applied communication research efforts have been directed specifically toward the solution of social problems.

The fourth issue concerns the need to insure that the public is aware of and uses communication-based knowledge. Communication professors have succeeded in convincing their university colleagues that communication skills are essential to effective citizenship and to success in everyday life. As a consequence, some form of communication study is required of many, if not most, university students in North America. The rising popularity of communication as an academic major in the United States also has produced a pool of graduates who have begun to make their mark on corporate and societal institutions. As more and more students have become exposed to communication principles, often via engaging, highly effective teaching, the communication discipline is starting to be seen as an ordinary part of university education, and communication students increasingly are looked on as having the ability to contribute to organizational and societal life from unique perspectives. Still, to date, the discipline has produced no scholar whose work instantly comes to mind when educated people think of the study of communication. We have, however, a cadre of commentators who appear on the national scene as critics and analysts of various communication events, and these scholar–teachers have made the public, policy makers, and scholars from other disciplines aware of the insights that communication research can provide in understanding and managing problematic situations.

Although communication has been understood from its earliest academic roots as a “practical discipline” (see Craig, 1989; see also Barge & Craig, this volume), academics in communication needed to be convinced that research, other than investigations into how to improve instruction, was necessary. In the earliest statement about the need for research in communication, James A. Winans (1915) wrote:

I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold.

We have lacked scholarship. We complain of prejudice and unjust discrimination, and we have grounds; but we had best face the truth. In the long run men pass for what they are. We have lacked scientific foundation for our special work. (p. 17)

Winans had to work hard to gain acceptance for his point of view. The result of his efforts was that many members of the communication discipline came to view research and theory building as necessary evils for academic respectability. Eventually, however, efforts to promote research within the discipline were successful enough that by the middle of the 20th century, a small body of theory began to emerge. Efforts to build theory and conduct research were spurred on by successes in researching communication disorders and in a burgeoning interest in media effects and propaganda. Interest in the study of communication (e.g., persuasion, group dynamics, and interpersonal relations) by scholars in other disciplines also began to influence the culture of the field. Eventually, the development of a more rigorous research culture in the field, along with a growing consciousness of the necessity for social relevance, birthed the notion that communication research could concern “applied” matters without threatening the discipline’s potential standing in the academy.

In the sections that follow, we outline how a research culture developed in the communication field, how discussions and conflicts eventually led to a call for socially responsible research, how the field reacted to that call, and how the term applied was used both to start a journal with a particular agenda and to label a unit in the field’s largest disciplinary society that had another agenda.

The Struggle for Disciplinary Identity and the (Sudden) Emergence of Applied Communication Research

We now take for granted that communication is a discipline whose scholarly understanding necessarily leads to application. That idea, however, has been axiomatic for a relatively brief period, fewer than 40 of the nearly 100 years since the establishment of a formal discipline of communication. Indeed, the founding of the discipline was driven primarily by a perceived need to separate from the field of English and to be seen as different from the discredited elocution movement (Gray, 1964). To gather information on how the idea of “applied communication research” emerged, we consulted the archives of the field’s journals, newsletters, and convention programs in an effort to gauge the concerns of the field’s leaders over time. We found that the concept responded at least as much to political disputes within the discipline as it did to scholarly ones.

It is entirely possible that parochial concerns, such as regional rivalries and jockeying for prestige within the academy, were as responsible as anything else for the formation in 1914 of the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS), the first name of the organization now known as NCA. James M. O’Neill, the first president of NAATPS, recalled in 1928 that the idea of a separate organization first was proposed in 1913 among a rump group of public speaking teachers who met following the conclusion of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference, itself a new organization founded only 2 years earlier in 1911. The group decided to mail a questionnaire to more than 100 members of the NCTE section for teachers of public speaking, with the results indicating wide support for a new organization (O’Neill, 1928). The sticking point was whether the new organization should be independent of or affiliated with NCTE, with the vote split about equally for each choice. After the NCTE section met again in 1914 without reaching a decision, 17 members of the section decided that they would break away and form their own organization (Cohen, 1994).

The founding group was interesting in at least three ways. First, its membership was entirely from colleges and universities, although the NCTE section contained a large number of high school teachers. Second, these 17 members hailed heavily from the Midwestern United States and overwhelmingly represented large state, often land-grant universities, such as the universities of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Third, the organization they formed was not the first organization devoted to public speaking. A separate organization, the Eastern Public Speaking Conference, was founded in 1910 at the initiative of Paul Pearson of Swarthmore College, and its first conference included members from many of the highly selective, private universities in the Mid-Atlantic states. Although this organization expanded to include national participation, convention attendance came primarily from the Northeast, including from such Ivy League institutions as Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Winans of Cornell and Irvah L. Winter of Harvard, 2 of the 17 founders of NAATPS, also were among the founding members of the Eastern conference, but once NAATPS became established, the Eastern conference lost some of its appeal. Eventually, public...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Editors
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Foundations of Applied Communication Research
• PART II Methods of Applied Communication Research
• PART III Issues in Applied Communication Research
• PART IV Contexts of Applied Communication Research
• PART V Exemplary Programs of Applied Communication Research