Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public
Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
acquaintances as well as among health care providers.
17. Health communication can focus on the study of health campaigns and information
sharing on the Internet use when seeking medical information.
18. The social scientific approach assumes that multiple truths exist because there exist
multiple perspectives and no fixed reality.
19. The critical approach assumes that a single Truth exists.
20. The interpretivist approach is focused on a struggle for power.
21. Social scientific approaches to research focus on description, correlation, and
prediction.
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public
Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Difficulty Level: Easy
Short Answer
1. What is the main advantage of the social scientific approach?
2. Why do interpretivist approaches reject the idea that research can ever be value
free?
3. When it comes to instruction and learning as the focus of communication education,
what area of study has received perhaps the most attention?
4. Textual analysis conducted as part of interpretivist research frequently takes what
form?
5. Describe at least one disadvantage to the social scientific approach.
6. What are the two primary methods used in the social scientific approach to studying
communication?
7. The ______ views the world as objective, causal, and predictable; researchers using
this approach primarily seek to describe communication activity and to discover
connections between phenomena or causal patterns.
8. What are 3 major programs of research in communication education or instructional
communication?
9. Early on in the discipline, a person did not study communication; rather, a person
studied ______.
10. Departments devoted to the study of speech and rhetoric were also experiencing
problems by the end of World War II. A ______ revolution had occurred during that
period.
11. There are many approaches to the study of communication, however, the three that
have had the most influence are ______.
12. The ______ approach assumes the world is objective, causal, and predictable.
13. The ______ approach assumes the world is subjective, arbitrary, and uncertain.
14. The ______ approach assumes the world is subjective in which there is an
imbalance of power.
15. ______ involves the analysis of recorded communication, which could be visual,
auditory, or both.
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public
Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Difficulty Level: Medium
Essay
1. Briefly explain the importance of associations, such as the National Communication
Association, including two of their most important functions.
2. Provide a brief explanation regarding the rise of interpersonal communication within
the academic setting.
3. Briefly explain the view of the social scientific approach and the types of research
methods often used in data collection by social scientists.
4. Provide a brief explanation of the two types of observation-based nonquantitative
data collection that may be used by interpretivist researchers (direct observation and
participant observation).
5. Explain how people in groups in real life rarely have zero history with one another
and what that means for the group.
6. Describe the social desirability effect and why it could be detrimental.
7. Unlike the social scientific approach, the data used in interpretivist research tend not
to be quantitative or number-based. Describe what type of non-quantitative data is
involved in interpretivist research.
8. Scholars taking the critical approach to communication try to uncover hidden or
explicit power within a societal group. Explain why this is important to the study of
communication.
9. What is the challenge of scholars who undertake the critical approach to
communication?
10. Describe at least one disadvantage of the interpretivist approach to communication.
11. Explain the use of experiments and how they are used as a research mechanism.
12. Explain the use of questionnaires and the different types of research questionnaires.
13. The social scientific approach to communication has some advantages. Name three
of them.
14. Explain how experiments and questionnaires can be culturally insensitive.
15. Name and explain the four areas of cultural communication study.
16. Explain how the study of health communication has evolved over time.
17. Explain what a research experiment entails and provide an example of an
experiment.
18. Discuss two disadvantages of social scientific research.
19. Explain what a convenience sample is and provide an example of how convenience
samples might not be representative of other groups.
20. Explain the research method of textual analysis.