The field of communication theory. Communication theory is a vast area which encompasses a variety of theories and approaches. Some scholars even say that there is no such notion as a finely cut framework or body of a communication theory. What is taught as communication theory at one institution is unlikely to be at all similar to what is taught within other communication schools. This theoretical variegation makes it difficult to come to terms with the field as a whole. There are some common taxonomies that are used to divide up the range of communication research.

Many authors and researchers divide communication by what are sometimes called "contexts" or "levels”. The study of communication in the US, while occurring within departments of psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology among others, generally developed from schools of rhetoric and schools of journalism. While many of these have become "departments of communication," they often retain their historical roots, adhering largely to theories from speech communication in the former case, and mass media in the latter. The great divide between speech communication and mass communication is joined by a number of smaller sub-areas of communication research, including intercultural and international communication, small group communication, communication technology, policy and legal studies of communication, telecommunication, and work done under a variety of other labels. Some of these departments take a largely social science perspective, others tend more heavily toward the humanities, and still others are geared more toward production and professional preparation.

These "levels" of communication provide some way of grouping communication theories, but inevitably, there are theories and concepts that leak from one area to another, or that fail to find a home at all. If communication is a cohesive field of study, one would expect to see a cohesive set of theories, or at least a common understanding of the structure of the field, and this appears to still be developing.

Another way of dividing up the communication field emphasizes the assumptions that undergird particular theories, models, and approaches. While this tends also to be based on institutional divisions, theories within each of the seven "traditions" of communication theory that Robert Craig suggests tend to reinforce one another, and retain the same ground epistemological and axiological assumptions. His traditions include the rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, and sociocultural traditions. Each of these are, for Craig, clearly defined against the others and remain cohesive approaches to describing communicative behavior. As a taxonomic aid, these labels help to organize theory by its assumptions, and help researchers to understand the reasons some theories may be incommensurable.

There are different research methods in communication:

● Experiments,

● Survey Research,

● Textual analysis,

● Ethnography. [EXTRACT].

Communication models.

Communication is a slippery concept, and while we may casually use the word with some frequency, it is difficult to arrive at a precise definition that is agreeable to most of those who consider themselves communication scholars. Communication is so deeply rooted in human behaviors and the structures of society that it is difficult to think of any social event that does not include communication. We might say that communication consists of transmitting information from one person to another. More precisely it may be defined as transferring thoughts, information, emotion and ideas through gesture, voice, symbols, signs and expressions from one person to another. In fact, many scholars of communication take this as a working definition. Furthermore, communication theory itself is, in many ways, an attempt to describe and explain precisely what communication is. Three things are most important and essential in any communication process they are Sender, Receiver and the Channel (medium). These three elements are indispensable to a successful model of communication. A model, according to a seminal 1952 article by Karl Deutsch ("On Communication Models in the Social Sciences"), is "a structure of symbols and operating rules which is supposed to match a set of relevant points in an existing structure or process." In other words, it is a simplified representation or template of a process that can be used to help understand the nature of communication in a social setting. Such models are necessarily not one-to-one maps of the real world, but they are successful only insofar as they accurately represent the most important elements of the real world, and the dynamics of their relationship to one another. The basic model, namely – sender, receiver and the channel was suggested by Claud Shannon and Warren Weaver. It is considered to be the fundamental, basic model, often called “mother of all models”. The model was designed to mirror the functioning of radio and telephone technologies. Their initial model consisted of three primary parts: sender, channel, and receiver. The sender was the part of a telephone a person spoke into, the channel was the telephone itself, and the receiver was the part of the phone where one could hear the other person. Shannon and Weaver also recognized that often there is static that interferes with one listening to a telephone conversation, which they deemed noise. The noise could also mean the absence of signal. The revised model includes: sender, message, transmission, noise, channel, reception and receiver. Nowadays, this model proves to be less effective for being too linear.

Shannon and Weaver argued that there were three levels of problems for communication within this theory.

The technical problem: how accurately can the message be transmitted?

The semantic problem: how precisely is the meaning 'conveyed'?

The effectiveness problem: how effectively does the received meaning affect behavior?

Daniel Chandler critiques the transmission model by stating:

It assumes communicators are isolated individuals.

No allowance for differing purposes.

No allowance for differing interpretations.

No allowance for unequal power relations.

Willbur Schramm’s communication model is a Circular Model, so that communication is something circular in nature. Wilbur Schramm (1954) indicated that we should examine the impact that a message has (both desired and undesired) on the target of the message.  Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experience, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings).

Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules:

1. Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),

2. Pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and

3. Semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent).

Therefore, communication is a social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common set of signs and a common set of semiotic rules. This commonly held rule in some sense ignores autocommunication, including intrapersonal communication via diaries or self-talk, both secondary phenomena that followed the primary acquisition of communicative competences within social interactions.

Advantage of Osgood- Schramm model of communication

1. Dynamic model- Shows how a situation can change

2. It shows why redundancy is an essential part

3. There is no separate sender and receiver, sender and receiver is the same person

4. Assume communication to be circular in nature

5. Feedback – central feature.

Disadvantage of Osgood- Schramm model of communication

This model does not talk about semantic noise and it assumes the moment of encoding and decoding. Semantic noise occurs when sender and receiver apply different meaning to the same message. It happens mostly because of words and phrases for e.g. technical language. Certain words and phrases will cause you to deviate from the actual meaning of the communication.

Wilbur Schramm’s Modifications:

Added to the model the context of the relationship, and how that relationship will affect Communicator A and Communicator B.

Included the social environment in the model, noting that it will influence the frame of reference of both Communicator A and B.

In the light of these weaknesses, Barnlund (1970) proposed a transactional model of communication. The basic premise of the transactional model of communication is that individuals are simultaneously engaging in the sending and receiving of messages.

In a slightly more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked reciprocally. Communication is viewed as a conduit; a passage in which information travels from one individual to another and this information becomes separate from the communication itself. A particular instance of communication is called a speech act. The sender's personal filters and the receiver's personal filters may vary depending upon different regional traditions, cultures, or gender; which may alter the intended meaning of message contents. In the presence of "communication noise" on the transmission channel (air, in this case), reception and decoding of content may be faulty, and thus the speech act may not achieve the desired effect. One problem with this encode-transmit-receive-decode model is that the processes of encoding and decoding imply that the sender and receiver each possess something that functions as a code-book, and that these two code books are, at the very least, similar if not identical. Although something like code books is implied by the model, they are nowhere represented in the model, which creates many conceptual difficulties.

Transactional model assumes that people are connected through communication; they engage in transaction. First, it recognizes that each of us is a sender-receiver, not merely a sender or a receiver. Secondly, it recognizes that communication affects all parties involved. So communication is fluid/simultaneous. This is what most conversations are like. The transactional model also contains ellipses that symbolize the communication environment (how you interpret the data that you are given). Where the ellipses meet is the most effective communication area because both communicators share the same meaning of the message.