Your assignments should be approximately 2,000 – 3,000 words. You may wish to attach appendices (e.g. supporting data) but tutors will not necessarily read appended material in detail.
Remember that this is a course at MA level. In addition to showing good understanding of the course materials it is expected that you will also be able to engage critically with the arguments examined in them. It is generally advisable to avoid expressions of personal opinion or anecdote unsupported by course-related evidence. Arguments should draw substantially on theories and research, themes and issues which are addressed in the course materials, quoting references where appropriate.
The use of citations is common practice in western scholarship: they protect the author from charges of plagiarism when the author is drawing on the research of others in order to develop an argument, they indicate sources of further or relevant reading for the benefit of readers, and they help tutors to judge how skilfully students have used their study materials. Please refer to the Course Handbook for guidance on the method you should use for referencing. You should avoid extensive quotations from the course materials or slavish repetition of the structure of evidence and arguments presented in them.
While it is expected that you will build on the research of sources and authorities drawn from the course materials, the assignments are also an opportunity for you to develop original arguments and insights. You should show strong sensitivity to the nature and controversies of media research and to issues of theory and methodology in research. Students who work in the communications industries should feel encouraged to reflect on aspects of everyday professional practice from a variety of different theoretical perspectives and, without necessarily criticizing their effectiveness within particular work contexts, look at professional practices as social phenomena or data which can help to illustrate theories about communications, media and society.
1
Assignment 1 Ref: 1 (4)
Option 01
Postgraduate Programmes in Media & Communication (by Distance Learning)
With reference to one or more of the many specific media-related issues which have inspired public interest and concern (e.g. ownership and control of media; violence on television; the ‘erosion of family life’; the rise of consumerism), explore and assess the strengths and weaknesses of three of the different traditions of media research as tools of enquiry.
Advice to students:
The question relates to any of the different research traditions identified in the course materials associated with Module One of the course. You should be aware that there is no fixed consensus as to the identification of these different traditions: you will find a longer list in Reader 1 (Boyd-Barrett and Newbold, 1995, Approaches to Media), or in McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (McQuail, 2010), especially Chapters 4 and 5, than in Units 1-6. But Units 1-6 discuss the most influential and commonly accepted terms of identification.
You have only recently started your study of the course, and your knowledge of how media researchers have investigated specific issues of public interest and concern may be neither broad nor deep at this stage. Nonetheless, you will find references in the Module One units to a variety of such issues, including issues to do with media as agents of persuasion, media and violence, media ownership and control, and media as agents of a global and globalizing culture. You will need to consider how a given issue is likely to be addressed by a given tradition, the features of that issue which one tradition will highlight and which another may tend to marginalize, and how one tradition compares with another in the relevance, comprehensiveness and potential yield of the questions and concepts on which it focuses. How do the different traditions differ in the questions they ask, in terms of the ideologies or views of life and society which they tend to take for granted? What models of communication and of knowledge or science underpin them? What models of humanity can you discern? Are the traditions associated with particular research methods? Where do you identify the greatest contrasts between them, and where can you discern similarities?
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