‘Fit for purpose’: a showcase of research methods for communication studies research

Abstract

Our volatile and challenging World is inextricably coupled to a communication landscape where fact and opinion and deliberate fabrications and fantasies co-exist, sometimes fleetingly but often long enough to have the potential to cause harm. Certainly, there is no doubt about the potential for widespread harm when false beliefs (O'Connor & Weatherall, 2019) and fake news (Nair, 2017) inform contemporary debates, especially those on topics of global importance such as climate change, market protection, immigration, immunisation, and energy sustainability. Research is showing that one reason for fearing falsehoods is that they spread faster than truth. For instance, in an epic study published in Science in 2018 that examined rumour cascades on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, information scientists Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral (2018) found that true news rarely spreads to more than 1000 readers while false news can easily reach between 1000 and 100,000 people. To fully appreciate how untrustworthy information is promulgated so rapidly and is likely to be readily accepted it is necessary to look beyond the individual and their information processing abilities to social networks, information ecologies, and societal level variables (Scheufele & Krause, 2019). By examining these dimensions, scholars can help the community at large to appreciate the way misinformation is embedded in the political, technological, and societal context (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017) and is contributing to an epistemic space that is increasingly being called 'the post-truth age' (Lewandowsky et al., 2017); an age where people can eschew once taken-for-granted criteria for evaluating truth claims and, in so doing, create an incoherent model of reality. By taking a wider view on how untrustworthy information is sustained, commentators argue (e.g., Vraga & Bode, 2017) that the likelihood of successfully defining, measuring, targeting and correcting, or mitigating the consequences of falsehoods is increased. Communication scholars' are ideally positioned to contribute to this objective in insightful, critical, and meaningful ways (See Bode & Vraga, 2015). However, just how they go about doing so will be determined by each researcher's ontological position. If they endorse the existence of an objective truth then their methodological decisions will differ from researchers who assume truth is subjective and socially constructed, a product of power and inequality and in need of change, or actually unknowable. This ontological diversity means that not only do researchers choose different research methods but they may not give the same credence to such terms as 'false belief' and 'fake news'. The researcher has to assume that others may not appreciate their ontology and epistemology or the research methods these underpin. This means research methods need to be communicated in sufficient detail to allow the audience to accept their integrity and have confidence in the findings. Otherwise, researchers risk becoming yet another untruste...