By Don Zimmerman, Ph.D., Principal, Communication Science, Inc. 

For our name, we borrowed Communication Science from a little-known academic discipline that emerged in the 1950’s. In the 1987 Handbook of Communication Science, editors Charles Berger and Steven Chaffee provided a detailed definition of communication science.

Paraphrased, communication science is a process of developing testable theories that seek to understand the production, processing, and effects of communication and that can be generalized to different communication settings.

Here’s my translation.

A theory represents scientists’ attempt to explain what they’ve observed about the world. When studying communication, they try to explain how people produce messages, how people think about the messages, and how messages change or fail to change information levels, attitudes, and behaviors.

Generalization asks if an explanation can “hold”—i.e., can it explain observations over time and in different social settings.

Testable means evaluating whether the theory explains or fails to explain scientists’ observations.

Communication scientists use a wide range of social science research methodologies and experimental designs to investigate communications.

Communication scientists try to figure out what communications work, what communications don’t work, when communications work and don’t, and why communications work or don’t.

Why the URL www.comscience4Help.com?

In creating our url, we used a short, unique name that summarizes our services.