Message Production

Types of Message Production Studies

Even when limiting one’s focus to social scientific approaches, the message production domain remains quite extensive, but a few simple guidelines aid in helping one navigate his or her way through the various techniques he or she is likely to encounter in research reports. A first guidepost concerns whether the purposes of a particular study are primarily descriptive or explanatory. Obviously these are not mutually exclusive research objectives, and both serve the ends of theory-building, but in many cases, it is possible to ascertain whether the relative emphasis of a project is weighted toward one or the other. As examples of description-oriented research in the verbal realm, a great deal of work has focused on cataloging various types of speech acts, compliance-gaining strategies, styles of interpersonal conflict, categories of deceptive messages, and self-presentation strategies, among many others. With respect to the nonverbal elements of messages, prime examples of [Page 977]descriptive research can be seen in the era of the 1960s to 1970s, or what might well be thought of as the “golden age of description,” when painstaking work was devoted to identifying classes of gestures, elements of facial expression, and so on.

In contrast to research that is primarily descriptive in nature are those studies, and attendant research methods, that are more concerned with explaining observed regularities in verbal and nonverbal behaviors. While the various characteristics of what people say and do are interesting in their own right, a key insight arising out of the development of cognitive science (beginning in the mid-1950s) was that these verbal and nonverbal cues reflect the operation of the mental systems that give rise to them. Thus, message features provide a window on the nature of the mind, and by manipulating the conditions under which people produce their messages and observing the subsequent effects of those manipulations on specific verbal and nonverbal cues, it should be possible to develop theories (i.e., explanations) of the nature of the processes that underlie those responses.

A second key methodological consideration centers on the distinction between studies that involve examination of messages produced in “naturalistic” contexts versus those conducted using experimental (or quasi-experimental) research designs. In truth, this consideration should more appropriately be thought of as a continuum rather than a dichotomy, bounded at one end by “real-world” interactions between two or more people, and at the other by laboratory investigations of message production (very often involving single subjects rather than dyads and speaking under highly constrained and controlled experimental conditions). In the field of communication, a prime exemplar of the former is found in the “language and social interaction” tradition and a classic example of the latter in studies involving the “SLIP” technique—a way of inducing speech errors in the laboratory.

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