Principles of Research and Practice Assignment Example

Principles of Research and Practice Assignment Example Principles of Research in Media and Cultural Studies â€" Assignment Example > Mass communication has a very important impact not only on people but on the whole social groups which varies in size from families to the whole populations and cultures. Therefore, not like more conventional scholastic disciplines like psychology, media research uses a wide variety of levels of analysis (Newman: 1998). A media researcher studying the effect of television violence on the aggressiveness of a child uses a psychological level; a researcher studying the impact of mass communication on the economic development of an entire country works at a sociological level. Generally speaking, media research engages more on the psychological or sociological levels (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill: 2003). The sociological level is tremendously broad because it covers different groups varying in size from dyads in order to complete a society. In fact, most media research is openly connected into a social psychological discipline that is usually described as the study of how individual s are pressured by other persons. Even within the discipline of social psychology, a quantity of researchers reveals a psychological turned and others a sociological one. If a researcher is working in a changeable field, he must be very cautious not to simplify results and theories inappropriately from one level to another (Maykut and Morehouse: 1994). The researcher might discover that societies that have extremely high levels of violence in their media be inclined to have high rates of violent crime, as well. This would not essentially show that violent criminals be likely to see more media violence than others do. An individualistic fallacy engages the conflicting assumption that there is a connection between individuals that produce a similar pattern among groups. There are researchers that work at only one level of analysis because the person is by far the most widespread rank in communication studies (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill: 2003).