El estado de la metodología experimental en la investigación en comunicación

Abstract

Communication, as a full social science, has already a long path in Spain to be installed in an explanatory and predictive epistemological level, and overcome the purely descriptive level. This paper seeks to highlight the importance and affordability for the experimental methodology to make that leap in communication research, and to infer causality between variables. In this sense, conceiving causality as the great epistemological challenge for communication research, we hypothesize that the use of experimentation, as the primary scientific method that allows causal inference, is higher in papers published in journals that are leading the international scientific scene that in the Spanish journals. To do this, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the presence of experimental methodology in a sample of national and international journals. In the Spanish scope the study is limited to journals published in 2010 indexed by the EC³ (Science and Scientific Communication Assessment) from the Universidad de Granada. On the other hand, the international journals analyzed are from the first quartile of the Journal Citation Reports® from the Social Science Citation Index provided by Thomson Reuters®. It was found a noticeable difference between the percentage of papers with experimental methodology in the international journals and the Spanish journals. We assume that this one can be a factor that explains the lack of presence of the Spanish journals on the highest levels of impact.