The School of Communication at The Ohio State University offers a unique graduate program for studying the underlying mechanisms and theoretical explanations for communication phenomena. We encourage our students to become their own scholars, finding their place in the larger study of communication processes and effects by working with multiple faculty across specializations and using multiple methods. We believe that this approach to graduate training is the way of the future, and will best prepare students to face the integrated communication landscape of the 21st century.
The School of Communication emphasizes the interconnectedness of various subfields in communication, including political communication, health communication, strategic communication, new communication technologies, mass communication, and social influence. (For more details on our focus areas, click here.) Problems addressed by each of these subfields are like pieces of a larger puzzle. Each subfield taps theory and research about communication processes and effects, and each subfield has something to learn from the other. In our School surface boundaries between subdisciplines are highly permeable, and the theories we build work to address core communication processes and effects across contexts as well as levels of analysis – but without ignoring either.
The School of Communication stresses methodological pluralism within the overall empirical, social science perspective of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences of which we are a part, along with programs such as Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Economics. We have state-of-the-art facilities that allow for a broad range of research from psycho-physiological responses to mediated messages, automated eye-tracking of visual stimuli, traditional laboratory experimentation, media content analysis, human-computer interaction and online behavior tracking, interpersonal and small group observation, to focus groups, field and community-based research, and national public opinion polls.
The School of Communication feels strongly that all graduate students accepted into our M.A. and Ph.D. program should be supported with Graduate Associateship or Graduate Fellowship funding packages. These funding packages allow students to focus all of their energies on better understanding communication theory and research without the need for outside employment while enrolled in course work or completing a thesis or dissertation.
E-mail the graduate coordinator
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