Cyprus International University Course Portal

This course provides an overview of the concepts, methods, and tools by which communication research is designed, conducted, interpreted, and critically evaluated. The primary goals 
of this course are to help you become a knowledgeable consumer and a limited producer of communication research as you develop skills in gathering, organizing, interpreting and presenting research information using competent and ethically defensible methods.

The following objectives will help you reach these goals:

(1) master the concepts and technical vocabulary of communication research, and be able to use this language appropriately;

(2) comprehend the relationship between theory and research methods in the study of communication as a social science;

(3) assess the ethical choices of researchers in conducting and presenting research;

(4) compare and contrast four major research methods (experimental, survey, textual analysis, and 
naturalistic inquiry) used to investigate communication behavior;

(5) develop skills necessary for conducting communication research;

(6) develop the ability to clearly communicate, both orally and in writing, the findings of original communication research to a lay audience; and

(7) become an intelligent consumer of research—able to read, understand, explain and critically evaluate communication and other research reported 
in scholarly journals as well as in the popular press.

This
course will
investigate critical
theory from its Marxist origins to the Frankfurt School and beyond, by
surveying its major theorists and their foundational texts, including that of Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm,
Marcuse, and Habermas. This will be followed
by an investigation into the contemporary re-conceptualizations and applications of critical
theory in different academic fields and traditions of thought, with special attentionon the field of media and communication studies.

This is PhD. level course.