Research is almost never a straightforward path, usually requiring you to evaluate and rewrite your work. The cartoon above shows the Seven Basic Steps of Research mentioned in Chapter 6 under the key term ‘Communication Research’ and the subheading ‘Seven Basic Steps of Research.’ Like in the real world where researchers undergo the cycle of reading literature, creating and revising drafts and publishing findings, the character in the comic comes out from the piles of papers only to dive back in and continue looking through them. This shows the cycles that researchers go through when doing research.

This cartoon mirrors the sentiment in the chapter that research is messy. It’s like what Einstein said “If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.” This captures the different paths that researchers go down when their hypotheses fail or when their data doesn’t align with what they were expecting. Just like the character in the comic rinses and repeats looking through the papers, communication researchers test, edit, and can sometimes completely change their studies, which embodies how the chapter calls for self-correction in research.

In my experience as an EMT, I have had experience with this sort of cycle. When evaluating a procedure once, the team drafted a survey asking for our opinions on it (read), administered it to colleagues (write), gathered feedback and noticed that there were inconsistencies in the responses. Thus, the team revised the procedure and conducted the survey process one more time. This process helped me understand how EMTs do research and make changes as necessary, like how Chapter 6 suggests when doing research.

The ‘rinse and repeat’ that the character is doing in the cartoon shows that in order to conduct effective communication research, you need to have persistence and flexibility. Each cycle of the seven steps helps bring us closer to getting insights that can predict behavior, inform practice, and create positive change.