Trends in Mass Communication Research in Nigeria A Guerrilla Warfare Dissertation

Investigated are the research trends in mass communication programs in Nigerian universities. The focus is on the methodological orientation of the lecturers who teach mass communication research method courses. Course outlines were sourced from five typical but purposively selected universities where mass communication is taught. The contents of the course outlines and the comments made by the lecturers who designed them were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The result shows that the methodological orientation of lecturers who teach research method courses in mass communication programs gravitate almost exclusively towards the quantitative research method. Conclusion is that either bad faith or ignorance or a combination of the two is responsible for preventing Nigerian universities from joining the community of global universities where methodological pluralism in social research has been the norm.

Keywords: Methodological trends, quantitative, qualitative, mass communication research,