Epistemological approach to communication research: meanings of communication, disciplinarity and criteria for building a discipline
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2020-1464Abstract
Introduction: In “Ferment in the Field” (1983), 37 years ago, Katz stated that the best thing that had happened to communication research was to stop looking for evidence of the media's ability to change opinions, attitudes and actions in the short term to analyze its role in the configuration of our images of reality. Mattelart (1983) encouraged to study the interaction between audience and media from a non commercial perspective and Ewen (1983) proposed using oral histories or literary sources. Four decades later, the short-term effects of media continue to be studied and predominates the analysis of their content (Martínez Nicolás and Saperas, 2011, 2016), analysis, that of media contents, on which as it happened thirty years ago (Cáceres and Caffarel, 1992; p. 12) the field seems to support its specificity, suffering the lack of an intellectual institutionalization (Peters, 1986; Lacasa, 2017) which can be filled through a meta-research of ideas, by distilling perspectives, concepts and methods that have been used in communication research. Method: Through the analysis of three reference volumes in meta-research, the volumes of the Journal of Communication “Ferment in the Field” (1983) and “The Future of the Field. Between fragmentation and cohesion” (1993) and volume 1 of Rethinking Communication (1989) “Paradigm Issues”. Results: We will be bringing perspectives regarding the meanings of communication, the disciplinary character of the field and regarding the requirements needed for turning the field into a science. The perspectives and proposals emerge, mainly, from two ways of understanding communication: as product or result and as a relationship.
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