Editors’ introduction: research methods in communication education scholarship

While communication education scholarship has been conducted using a range of methods, and the current Aims and Scope of Communication Education are explicit about welcoming “scholarship from diverse perspectives and methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, and critical/textual approaches,” there have been limitations in the extent to which some methods have been utilized and accepted in the past. At the same time, many complementary disciplines have developed new or more rigorous methods for conducting research using a wide range of epistemological approaches that could be useful in exploring deeply meaningful questions in communication education scholarship. For this forum, we invited essays exploring ways that we can learn from other disciplines (and from other areas within our own discipline) to expand the methodological tools that we use in our research. Authors were asked to address the following question in their essays: