Questions of change are of central importance to communication and media research, yet discussions on the temporal nature of change, and the challenges it raises for theorizing and researching communication, have so far remained sporadic and disconnected. This article argues that in order to adequately comprehend and explain change, the field needs to engage more fully with the challenges of researching change over time, and ground the theorizing of change more firmly in empirical research. The goal of this article is to foster a more concerted discussion on these issues that will hopefully move research forward. The first part of the article reviews the breadth and diversity of existing empirical approaches to comprehending change over time across the field. The article then identifies some of the problems and oversights of current approaches and discusses possible solutions, drawing both on proposals developed by communication and media scholars and those developed in other disciplines.
History
Published in
Journal of Communication
Volume
66
Issue
2
Pages
266 - 279
Citation
MIHELJ, S. and STANYER, J., 2016. Taking time seriously? Theorizing and researching change in communication and media studies. Journal of Communication, 66(2), pp.266-279.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2016-03-22
Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: MIHELJ, S. and STANYER, J., 2016. Taking time seriously? Theorizing and researching change in communication and media studies. Journal of Communication, 66(2), pp.266-279, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12218. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.