English 7702: Research Design in Technical and Professional Communication
[Fall 2009]




Home

Syllabus

Blackboard

Calendar

Instructor Contact Information: click here.

    Welcome to ENGL 7702: Research Design in TPC!

In this course, you will be introduced to some of the most common empirical research designs and methodologies that you might use to study professional communication in academic and non-academic work environments.

In English 7701: Research Methods in Technical and Professional Communication, you learned about what is sometimes called "secondary research," the process of finding and evaluating the results that researchers have already produced. Research almost always begins with a survey of what is already known about a topic or problem, and then proceeds to further probes that are designed to discover new knowledge. The 7702 course follows upon 7701 in just this way: having learned how to probe and scrutinize the existing body of research in 7701, you will now learn how to develop an original research question and then answer that question by means of an original research design.

A disclaimer: This course focuses on content needed by students for whom this masters is a terminal degree. My goal for the course is to familiarize you with many of the most common research methodologies, and also to help you to develop a "researcher's sensibility" about the problems surrounding professional and technical communication. No single survey of research designs, however, can give you all that you need to know to implement an empirical research study. If your job requires you to conduct empirical research, or if you go on for doctoral work and you need to develop a full-fledged research project for your dissertation or publication, you will need to study your chosen research methodologies in greater depth to complete your work. You may also need to seek the help of experts, such as statisticians, to ensure that your research is valid.

Because many of you will conduct applied research on professional documents in your careers (either formally or informally), this course covers some of the research approaches used in usability studies in more depth than it treats some other types of research. But this area of research is broad and deep. To develop expertise in usability studies, you may wish to enroll in a semester-length course on that topic.

Much of what we'll discuss (and almost all of what we'll read) in this course is formal research. But be aware that many of you will find yourselves conducting informal research at some point in your careers, particularly in non-academic work environments. The relationship between formal and informal research is a continuum, not a distinct line; the methods we discuss this semester can often be applied in more or less comprehensive ways, depending upon whether your purpose is to uncover (and publish) new knowledge, propose new understandings of a problem, recommend a new work process, or simply answer an immediate workplace question. But "informal" doesn't mean "sloppy"; even if you're not writing up the results of your research in a formal report, you should approach research with care, discipline, and objectivity.

    Course Goals

  1. To understand the nature of original (primary or formal) research in the field of technical and professional communication, in both academic and non-academic environments.
  2. To review, as needed, techniques and strategies involving secondary research (the content of 7701: Research Methods in Technical and Professional Communication), particularly those involved in searching and synthesizing the literature about a topic (literature review or evaluative bibliographic essay) as part of conducting primary or original research.
  3. To prepare you to identify problems and state them as research questions or hypotheses as the first step in conducting primary (original) research.
  4. To provide you with the skills, strategies, and knowledge to help you understand what is needed to take a problem from concept into planning and development of (1) documents and instruments needed to conduct the research. 
  5. To help you understand aspects of the research process through readings about the methods and discussion of sample research articles in which the author(s) employ the methodologies. In that discussion, you will look at the articles in terms of aspects of research (e.g., research question, literature review, and  methodology used), not focusing on the article's content as such.

   Instructor Contact Information

Dr. Brent Henze
Bate Building, Room 2130
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

252.328.6699
henzeb@ecu.edu

Email is the best way to reach me. I check my voicemail periodically when I'm in the office, but if the day is full of meetings and other tasks, and I'm in and out of the office, I may not receive your voicemail promptly, probably because I'm checking email.
End of Page