Communications and Women's Studies: Methods and Research

Introduction: Two Disciplines Compared

While academic scholarship shares a number of techniques and approaches, different disciplines — particularly in the social sciences — attempt to answer questions in sometimes divergent ways. For example, an anthropologist and a sociologist might study an indigenous tribal culture and ask many of the same questions. The anthropological approach, however, would likely focus on the manner in which physical and social characteristics created that particular culture, while the sociological approach might look more at the functionality of that culture: its organization, development, and internal attributes.

This is a similar paradigm to the disciplines of communications and women's studies. While both are broad disciplines, communications is certainly the grander of the two, encompassing literally hundreds of sub-disciplines. Communication studies deals with human communication, animal communication, mass media, speech communications, rhetoric, communication arts, journalism, public relations, computer-related communications, and new media. It also examines the flexibility of how messages are sent and received across any number of contexts. Communications studies is often popular precisely because it is so flexible and has so many relevant connections to multidisciplinary programs (Communication Studies, 2012).

Women's studies, sometimes known as feminist studies, is also an interdisciplinary field that focuses on exploring politics, society, history, and culture from a woman's perspective. It examines the ways in which societal norms of gender, race, class, and sexuality impact society and produce social inequities. Within each major social science discipline, one can adopt a feminist perspective. A scholar interested in the Renaissance, for instance, might explore the ways women participated in the era's societal and cultural blossoming, or how women's roles shifted with the rise of the middle class (Scott, ed., 2008).

Research Questions in Communications

As other disciplines continue to evolve, the study of communication — whether interpersonal, intrapersonal, political, or social — continues to fascinate scholars across many fields. Modern communication studies integrates aspects of both the humanities and the social sciences. Within the social sciences, the discipline addresses questions relating to sociology, psychology, political science, economics, and public policy. In the humanities, scholars trace rhetoric and persuasion and explore how communications intersects with engineering, architecture, mathematics, and the integration of the hard and soft sciences.

The information age has also brought new ways of looking at communications — specifically, how electronic communications change meaning, rhetoric, and message, including through texts, social networks, and related media (Leung, et al., 2008). These emerging questions reflect how rapidly the field must adapt to technological and cultural change.

Research Questions in Women's Studies

Current scholarship in women's studies often takes a micro-perspective on issues, examined through a historical lens. Now that there has been such a strong push toward globalism, more scholarship is also evolving from an international perspective. Many scholars, for instance, are exploring the roles women played in regions not traditionally associated with a feminist historical tradition, such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. There also appears to be a growing movement toward post-colonial methodology in disciplines such as medicine, nursing, sports, historical geography, and ethnic studies that focus on a broader spectrum of experience.

The information age further allows women's studies to explore how technology has the potential to empower women in the developing world through access to micro-finance and education. Interestingly, communications studies and feminist studies frequently overlap, since the quality of communication and the construction of messages is central to the research questions of both disciplines (Morin and Berg, 2010).

Methodologies in Communications

Because communications studies integrates aspects of both the social sciences and the humanities — and increasingly the hard sciences — research methodology may vary widely within the field. All communications research originates with a question and is systematic in collecting and analyzing information. Depending on the subject matter, it may be qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method in scope. To be considered scholarly, research must be viable across the curriculum and must employ established principles of data collection and analysis. In its basic outline, the research process begins with a question, proceeds to experimental design, data collection, observation or experimentation, and concludes with analysis that proves or disproves the hypothesis while contributing a relevant discussion to the field (Cary, 2003).

Contemporary communications theory often asks questions about the manner in which certain professions communicate their message to clients, and about how those clients are expected to understand and respond. As the demographics of the developed world age, this is particularly evident in research on communication styles within the medical field and patient-centered care models (Levinson, et al., 2010).