Communication Impact: Designing Research That Matters

Communication Impact: Designing Research that Matters. Susanna Hornig Priest, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 278 pp. $75 hbk. $29.95 pbk. The communication field in general and graduate research methods instructors in particular should welcome this book by editor Susanna Hornig Priest. She has compiled eighteen chapters-or case studies-that detail various communication research projects from the first-person perspective of the contributing authors. In doing so, Priest captures both the "passion and the problems" of these projects, which, as she points out, are not always evident in journal articles. Based on the theme that communication researchers can make a positive difference in the world, the book includes various types of research with the potential to do just that. Its five parts include three to four chapters each, and each part examines a specific type of research: community-based inquiry, projects involving organizations and institutions, problem-focused studies, research across cultures, and new technologies. By giving the researchers their own individual voices, Priest allows readers to go inside the research projects and to view them from conception to conclusion. Each section begins with an overview of the coming chapters and the major concepts that tie the scholars' work together. Priest also gives the reader insight into why she developed the book and provides concluding thoughts in a preface and afterword. The various research methods are described and discussed in each chapter, as are the scholars' rationales for using them, the problems they encountered, and the adaptations they made along the way, whether to accommodate cost and time constraints, language and cultural barriers, or Institutional Review Board concerns. Such introspection and honesty regarding the research process is refreshing and provides a great service to our graduate students and young researchers, who may often assume research methods and research projects to be more fixed and certain than they are. The exploratory and creative aspect of research is discussed and valued in this text, as are the myriad methods available to communication researchers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in many of the projects, and the relatively new qualitative method of autoethnography-combining autobiography with ethnography-is discussed in two chapters. Priest takes the opportunity to define methodological concepts in separate boxes that accompany the chapters in which the concepts are mentioned. For example, research paradigms, survey terminology, field experiments, statistical tests, working with transcripts, depth interviews, focus groups, variables, correlation coefficients, and more are explained in greater detail in a page or two, giving the reader enough information to grasp the method or concept more fully. …