1. Research is asking questions and finding answers.
2. Scholarly research is the discovery of answers to questions through the application of scientific and systematic procedures.
3. Academic research follows accepted norms and procedures that have been adopted by scholars from many disciplines.
4. In the process of scientific discovery and explanation, four outcomes are sought: describing behavior, determining causes of behavior, predicting behavior, and explaining behavior.
5. The best research is that which is driven by theory, validates a theory, further explains a theory, challenges an existing theory, or aids in the creation of theory.
6. As a social science, communication researchers use both quantitative and qualitative methods.
7. The study of communication from a social science perspective looks for patterns across cases and focuses on symbols used to construct messages, messages, the effects of messages, and their meanings.
8. Communication scholars start with an interesting question and then formulate a formal research question or hypothesis.
9. Questions suitable for communication research are those for which the researcher has a personal interest, one that is of social importance, and one that has or can help develop theoretical significance.
10. A hypothesis is a tentative, educated guess or proposition about the relationship between two or more variables.
11. A formal research question asks what the tentative relationship among variables might be, or asks about the state or nature of some communication phenomenon.
12. Research is judged to be scientific by 12 characteristics: its empirical nature, its ability to be tested, the extent to which it can be falsified or disproved, the ability to replicate or repeat findings, the public nature of findings, its self-correcting nature, the ability to measure or observe the phenomenon of interest, the ability to minimize error through the control of procedures, its level of objectivity, the skepticism it raises, the generalizability of findings, and its heuristic nature.
13. Adopting a methodology and using it without regard to its appropriateness or effectiveness in answering the research question or hypothesis is known as the law of the hammer.
14. Questions suitable for communication research may be questions of fact, questions of variable relations, questions of value, or questions of policy.
