The Media Debate

The online debate that we had about the effectiveness of different types of media was very educational. Clark strongly attacks the methodology of the research projects that find that a certain type of media is better than another. It reminded me a little of a theorist I learned about in Personality Theories. I can't remember his name, but he basically said that the vast majority of studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences are horribly done and contribute little to the field.

I've found this to be the case of a whole lot of research at the University of Utah. While some call Social science a "soft science", because it deals with so much subjective information, the studies are poorly designed. I think the biggest problem is participants. Nearly every social science study that I've ever seen or heard of at the University of Utah simply uses students who are participating in order to fulfill a course requirement. So you move from a randomly selected group, to adults in college who are taking a course in a social science. Then, they often don't have an independent variable to test and the findings are just descriptive or correlative. While I know that this would make the experiments far more expensive and complicated, they would at least add to the science.

These, and more issues, have disrupted studies looking at which media is more effective. First, the studies often used different instructors who have different styles, and much more time tends to be spent preparing the instruction in the media that is being investigated and not on the media that it is being compared to. In other words, you get a piece of garbage lecture versus a fully developed video.

The message to take away from all of this. Some media might be better than others, but it's not as clear-cut as some would like to say. Also, when discussing research results, it is very important to closely examine the methodology, and don't just accept their results as irrefutable facts.