A CONTENT-ANALYSIS OF 3 MASS-COMMUNICATION RESEARCH TRADITIONS - SOCIAL-SCIENCE, INTERPRETIVE STUDIES, AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS

This study assessed the extent to which researchers conform to the ass umptions associated with the social scientific, interpretive, and crit ical traditions of inquiry. For each tradition, a set of ten variables was examined: ontology, epistemology, nature of the research question , theory, hypotheses, sampling, data collection, verification, data an alysis, and generalization. Content analyses of 245 journal articles i ndicate that researchers conform highly to expectations associated wit h ontology, epistemology, data collection, and data analysis, but less so with the remaining variables. These data suggest that scholars are strongly guided by the expectations associated with these traditions. Occasional deviations suggest some convergence of attributes.