A qualitative metaresearch to (re)build the field: typology of objectives, theoretical perspectives and methods for communication research

Abstract

As long as communication, especially digital communication, is of interest for consolidated fields such as sociology or political sciences and for fields of more recent creation such as librarianship, the field of communication research functions as an amnesic sub-discipline without disciplinary ambition (Pooley, 2020). In order to contribute to intellectually (re) constructing a field that can be useful to society, we are providing a typology of objectives, theoretical perspectives and methods generated from a distillation of volume 2 of Rethinking Communication (1989), “Paradigm Exemplars”, a volume specialized in meta-research in communication and considered as a continuation of the special volume of the Journal of Communication, "Ferment in the Field", published in 1983 (Surlin, 1991). The conceptual and procedural devices brought and grouped into those aimed at studying relationships between people and those aimed at studying relationships between people and media, are useful in a moment in which human relationships and relationships between people and media continue articulating societies, making necessary to review and redefine the ways of approaching them to further the scope of communication research, limited for decades, fundamentally, to the analysis of media content (Cáceres and Caffarel, 1992; Martínez-Nicolás and Saperas, 2011, 2016; Anderson and Middelton, 2015) through a content analysis that Krippendorff (2017) recommends to leave.