(Excerpt of an exposition submitted to Dr. SW Smith’s class, Communication 820 (Communication Theories and Process), Department of Communication, College of Communication Arts and Sciences, Michigan State University)
What is post-positivism? Is it some esoteric term that scholars coined to give even more legitimacy to an invented world that is not shared by the public? How does it impact on the study of human communication?
In general, the post-positivist movement in research rejects the assumption of the positivist perspective popular until the early 20th century which placed value on objective reality where any idea that does not have an equivalent in the physical world is considered non-existent. This has important implications to the discipline of communication research creating a set of propositions different but not totally hostile to the ideas of realism, objectivity and scientific inquiry. First, in its ontological level, while arguing against the positivist notion of a static social world, it allows for subtle amounts of realism by proposing that our perceptions of reality could only be partly true or could even be wrong since we do not have a full grasp of the phenomena around us. That apart from our assumptions of the nature of these phenomena, there exist independent realities which we could use as yardsticks in verifying the plausibility of our assumptions.
This separation of the socially constructed reality and the objective reality, reflective of the social constructionist view, creates complex relationships which the post-positivist communication researcher could delve into. Thus, the post-positivist ontology is defined in terms of the patterns and regularities inherent and evident in human interactions despite of the distinctive characteristics of individuals. Put into practice, the natural laws that governed the falling of a leaf reflects the same laws that govern the “falling out of a man from a crowd,” a regularity as it is called–in the same way that individual responses to health crisis may differ but patterns of denial or over-optimistic reactions may be evident in majority of the population.
Second, at the epistemological and axiological level, traces of positivist approaches to the study of regularities and patterns in communication phenomena are still discernable. For example, investigations on knowledge are still couched within the explanatory power of causal relationships. When exposure to health messages and knowledge on health prevention demonstrate a positive correlation, the reduction of disease incidence could be explained partly by access to information and level of awareness among people. The determination of causal relationships in human interactions brings to the fore another defining characteristics of post-positivist communication research—the relationship between the phenomenon under study and the investigator. While positivism assumed that knowledge is independent of the researcher, post-positivism proposed that knowledge is not separate from the investigator and that his/her proclivities have a way of showing in his/her choice of research topic. Knowing that the researcher cannot totally detach himself/herself from his/her orientation, post-positivist communication research makes use of scientific methods to prevent personal biases and the probability of chance from confounding the research result. Thus, post-test data are compared to pre-test data using statistical tools, for example, to ascertain changes in dependent variables as an outcome of changes in the independent variable. In addition, research results undergo rigid examination by a community of scholars in the field to ascertain objectivity and hasten the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is rather accepted by post-positivists as confirmation or contradiction of previously accepted truths but the value of having largely contesting views lies in their ability to stimulate further explorations and new findings that will add depth to an existing theory or give birth to a new paradigm.
