LCC 6107. Quantitative Communication Research Methods.

This course will introduce you to quantitative communication research methods. The goal of the course is to make you a more informed user of quantitative research. You will probably need to take additional graduate courses (or pursue extensive individual study) in quantitative methods before you can claim to have fully mastered even the relatively small subset of statistical techniques we will cover in this course, but this course can provide you with the basic knowledge required to: understand quantitative literature in a variety of disciplines; incorporate quantitative data in multimedia design proposals; and design and implement statistically modest studies of multimedia users and products.

This course includes both theory and practice. We will cover basic research design issues and statistical concepts as well as specific statistical techniques and software packages. Special attention will be given to quantitative procedures appropriate for the study of computer-mediated communication and multimedia users and products. In addition, we will be concerned throughout the course with the visual display of quantitative data.

This quarter we will focus on online newspapers and advertising. We will review the extensive quantitative research literature on newspaper reading and the much smaller but rapidly growing body of research literature on Internet communication processes. We will examine in considerable detail recent online news initiatives. Our goal here will be to develop a basic understanding of the statistical concepts and tools required to design and implement sophisticated quantitative studies of online news users and content.

Evans.