Research in Communication Studies

The Communication Studies Department at the University of Texas, Austin is a research intensive place. A student should love to do research to be happy here.

Both our master’s and doctoral students present their original research at national and regional conferences. Most of our master’s students choose to write a thesis for completion of their master’s degree requirements. In writing a thesis, the master’s students gather original data, analyze it, and then write it up.

Our faculty members teach students how to do research on many different communication topics and with various methodologies. We have faculty members who use quantitative methods, as well as faculty members who use qualitative methods.

Clearly, a researcher will get a different answer to a question depending on the method used to investigate the question. The more methods used in various studies around a topic, the better an answer we will eventually have. To that end, our department offers several avenues to support our graduate student’s research that include field research opportunities and a student pool of research subjects.