Four schools of communication and their views

The traditional school, also known as the empirical school or the management school, mainly refers to the school that examines social phenomena from the empirical facts and focuses on carrying out research on the effects of communication, which is relative to the critical school that is good at examining social phenomena in a discursive way. Generally speaking, the empirical school mainly refers to the mainstream communication research mainly in the United States, and Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, Lewin and Hovland, who are regarded as the four founding fathers of communication by Schramm, are the typical representatives of the empirical school.

The empirical school, as the mainstream communication research paradigm in the United States and the West, is rich in achievements. American scholars Lowry and Devereux summarized the 14 famous research results of the empirical school into a book entitled Milestones in Mass Communication Effectiveness Research.

The main characteristics of the empirical school lie in the empirical research method, the pragmatic research purpose, and the pluralistic view of society.

(I) Empirical Research Methods

The so-called empirical research method is a method of empirical examination of social phenomena or social behavior by using observable, measurable and quantifiable empirical materials. The premise of this methodology lies in the fact that the researcher recognizes the objectivity of the laws, the verifiability of the laws, and the subjective initiative of human beings, so that the empirical research methods The objectivity of the laws is verified mainly through empirical methods, which emphasize objectivity and logic.

Thus, the primary goal of empirical research method is to collect indisputable scientific data and materials related to theoretical assumptions, and the process of empirical evidence should be objective and repeatable in order to provide other scholars with the means of verification, and the conclusions drawn from analyzing the data or materials need to be subjected to public academic discussions in order to construct general theories about social phenomena.

The empirical research method emphasizes practical and reliable empirical materials or objective data, and advocates explaining the causes of social phenomena and social behaviors from the variables of the environment or external conditions, with a certain degree of objectivity and rationality of data. However, empirical research methods also have limitations that cannot be ignored.

First of all, social phenomena and human behavior have infinite complexity, especially when it comes to the subject's mental and rational activities, empirical materials do not have the authority; secondly, the current empirical research relies on the techniques of questionnaires and controlled experiments, which are regarded as scientific only in the probabilistic sense, and controlled experiments can not illustrate the complexity of the social reality; furthermore, empirical research relies mainly on personal data, which can be used to explain the causes of social phenomena and social behavior from environmental or external conditions. Empirical research relies mainly on the empirical material of individuals or small groups, which is of some utility in the study of social micro-phenomena, but lacks scientific validity in the examination of social history and macro-social structure; and lastly, although empirical research methods emphasize objectivity, pure objectivity can only be an illusion.

(2) The Research Purpose of Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a kind of thinking and philosophical school widely spread in the West, which believes that the criterion for judging a thing or the truth is not the thing itself, but the objective behavior caused by it, and believes that "the truth is to be used for my purpose", and emphasizes that social science research must be based on the real life of the society and solve practical problems. It emphasizes that social science research must be based on the real life of society and solve practical problems.

It is this pragmatic research purpose that led to the empirical school and its focus on effect research, such as Lasswell's propaganda research, Hovland's persuasion research, and Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research, etc., focusing on examining the impact of communication on human psychology, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as focusing on how to achieve the goals of an individual or a group through communication, and the "Milestones in Mass Communication Research" mentioned above are all important. Milestones in Effectiveness Research," both mentioned above.

(3) Pluralistic View of Society

The empirical school, also known as the managerial or administrative school, is due to their adherence to a pluralistic view of society, which denies that Western capitalist society is a class-distributed society, and instead sees it as a society of competing and balancing pluralistic interests. Thus, the task of communication studies is not to change the existing capitalist system, but to achieve social management by improving the mechanisms of communication.

This pluralist ideology of the empirical school determines that it will not take a critical standpoint to study mass communication under the capitalist system, but rather, for the purpose of preserving the existing system, to do something to repair it from the perspective of "management". It is because of this pluralistic view of society, received a lot of criticism from the critical school.

Second, the critical school

The critical school, originated in Europe, is actually a general term for research in Europe and the United States that adheres to the critical point of view and methodology, and it is a collection of different points of view and methodology, rather than referring to a particular school of thought, including the Frankfurt School as a beginning, the school of political economy of communication from a macroscopic point of view into the school of political economy, the theory of ideology, and the school of cultural research, structuralist semiotics, and the school of cultural studies, which are cut into the micro point of view. studies school, structuralist semiotics, feminism, cultural imperialism, and postmodernism and poststructuralism.

The difference between the critical school and the empirical school lies in the research method on the one hand, the critical school opposes the positivist attitude, but not the positivist method, opposes the direct transposition of nature's research methods to the study of human communication phenomena, recognizes that the main body of communication research is the human being with thoughts and subjective initiative, puts the communication and the media in the context of the study of the historical, social and cultural context. It focuses on macro issues such as social structure and ideology, and has a strong theoretical discursive color.