Undergraduate - UnitAZA3453 - Research fundamentals

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2014 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

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Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Offered	South Africa Second semester 2014 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Ms Rose-Marie Bezuidenhout

Synopsis

The unit introduces critical and practical approaches to research in the media and communication industries. It presents a critical overview of the rationale for research in industry and academia. Various traditions of inquiry are explored and applied to typical research studies conducted in communication and the media with specific reference to South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Specific quantitative, and qualitative research methodologies are investigated. Various key ethical and critical research issues are deliberated.

Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

Understand the uses of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in academic and industry contexts.
Understand the uses of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in science and non-science environments
Understand the nature and use of a theoretical framework in a research project
Define and formulate a research project, including hypotheses, research problems and questions, goals, ethical considerations, literature reviews,theoretical frameworks, and data collection, analysis and interpretation methods.
Demonstrate sound awareness of ethical principles in research practices.
Demonstrate familiarity with specific methodologies, including, for example, ethnography, case study, survey, textual-, thematic-, discourse- audience- and quantitative content analysis
Reflect on relationships between local and global frameworks in developing approaches to research.

Assessment

(1) Critical theory component: take home exam quizz (1500 words): 30%
(2) Ethics precis (1000 words): 20%
(3) Student research projects (3000 words): 40%
(4) Tutorial participation (500 words): 10%