Reading the NYT piece in particular makes me (as a political communication researcher) wonder: How valuable are many of our field's studies that are guided not by the size and relevance of the questions, but rather by these questions' being "researchable" with conventional empirical methods and "analyzable" with conventional data analysis techniques?
I personally feel that purely theoretical work (that which has no direct practical application - as in "solving an interesting intellectual puzzle") is still valuable: As we are trying to understand the human nature, we simply cannot foresee if/how the insights we develop today can be relevant for the future discoveries or practical applications. I doubt that mathematics theorists of several hundred years ago envisioned how their discoveries back then could be instrumental to today's sophisticated computations relied on by biotech geneticists, computer scientists, physicists, engineers, NSA code brakers, etc. Perhaps those mathematics theorists tried to understand some puzzling numerical phenomena of their day, and incrementally got to where there are now.
But, still it appears that, generally, trying to put publications on one's CV, wrapping up research projects quickly, and following conventions is more prized in political communication research field than trying to answer "big" questions... And that seems to reduce our field's relevance and advancement. What do you, fellow researchers, think? Do we and political science have a problem?
4 comments:
Politicians of a certain type have used research funding as a target for a long time. Political science research seems to be the current target of at least one conservative politician in the senate. There is nothing new in this.
Social significance and policy relevance are important questions for any discipline and these are usually the province of macro-level research. It is difficult to imagine a discipline having a great deal of policy relevance unless it has a strong macro-level research tradition. Our recent piece on this topic elaborates this argument considerably and discusses the issues that slow developments in this area, as well as some promising avenues of research (McLeod, Kosicki & McLeod, 2010).
Communication has taken a decisive turn in the past few decades to remodel itself based on psychology. This has many benefits and psychology is doubtlessly a successful discipline no matter how you want to look at it. Whatever the benefits of this approach to communication, creating and fostering a strong macro/policy research presence has not been among them. In saying this I am in no way attacking psychology. I am simply noting that other questions may be neglected.
Advances in communication have changed many things about the world in recent decades and continue to be vibrant sources of innovation in many aspects of contemporary life. But you would not necessarily know this by reading our leading journals.
McLeod, J.M., Kosicki, G.M. & McLeod, D.M. (2010). Levels of analysis and communication science. In C. R. Berger, M. E. Roloff, and D. Roskos-Ewoldsen (Eds.), The Handbook of Communication Science, (2nd Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
For an interesting example of how communication research informs important real-world problems, see this recent NCI Tobacco Control Monograph, which can be accessed online in multiple languages.
National Cancer Institute. The role of the media in promoting and reducing tobacco use. NCI Toabacco Control Monograph No. 19. Bethesda, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. NIH Pub. 07-6242. June 2008.
Ivan,
It's good to raise these questions and I think creating a blog forum like this is very important generally for the field.
Scanning the pages of CR or JOC I think reinforces the point that Nie makes in the NY Times article:
In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.
Is the "rigor" of the methodology the real problem? It seems that using rigorous methods to inform us about "big" problems is a good thing; but incentivising low-ambition studies through tenure publication requirements seems to be the real problem...
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