What Is Communication Studies? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Communication studies is the academic discipline that studies how humans create, exchange, and interpret meaning — through language, nonverbal behavior, and media — in interpersonal, organizational, political, and mass-mediated contexts. It asks how messages are produced, transmitted, received, and given meaning, and what effects that process has on individuals, relationships, organizations, and societies. Communication studies (often shortened to “communication,” or pluralized as “communications” in some U.S. department names) sits at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences: part of the field studies communication the way rhetoric always has, as an art of persuasion and public discourse, and part of it studies communication the way psychology or sociology does, as a measurable social-scientific behavior. This guide covers what communication studies actually studies, its major sub-disciplines, the real research funding landscape for the field, the methods researchers use, and typical training and career pathways — the research-administration layer a general encyclopedia entry on the subject usually leaves out.

What communication studies actually studies

Communication studies grew out of three distinct scholarly traditions that still shape how the field is organized today, and most departments still teach and hire across some version of all three:

• The rhetorical/humanistic tradition. The oldest strand, tracing back to classical rhetoric (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the Greco-Roman tradition of training public speakers). Modern rhetorical studies analyzes public discourse, argumentation, and persuasive texts — political speeches, social movements, media texts — using close textual and critical analysis rather than quantitative measurement.
• The social-scientific tradition. Emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century alongside psychology and sociology, treating communication as an observable, measurable behavior: how persuasion works, how information spreads, how relationships are built and maintained through talk, how media exposure affects attitudes and behavior. This strand uses experiments, surveys, and content analysis, and is the tradition most directly comparable in method to the social sciences CASRAI covers elsewhere.
• The critical/cultural tradition. Draws on cultural studies, critical theory, and media studies to examine communication as a site where power, ideology, and social meaning are produced and contested — how media representations shape identity, whose voices get amplified or silenced, and how communication technologies reshape social structures.

Because of this three-part ancestry, “what is communication studies” doesn’t have a single clean answer the way a more methodologically unified field might. What holds the discipline together is its object of study — the process of meaning-making through message exchange — not a single method or theoretical school. A useful working definition: communication studies is the systematic study of how messages are constructed, transmitted, and interpreted across every scale of human interaction, from a single face-to-face conversation to global mass media.

Not to be confused with: communication sciences and disorders

Communication studies is frequently confused with communication sciences and disorders (CSD) — the field encompassing speech-language pathology and audiology — because the names overlap and both sometimes appear in a university’s “communication” building. They are different disciplines with different training requirements. Communication studies is an unlicensed academic and social-science field studying how communication functions in social, organizational, political, and media contexts; nothing about a communication studies degree confers clinical scope of practice. Communication sciences and disorders is a clinical health discipline studying disorders of speech, language, voice, and hearing, with graduate training that leads to a clinical credential (in the U.S., typically certification through the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, ASHA, and a state license) required to practice as a speech-language pathologist or audiologist. A researcher or research administrator encountering “communication” in a university context should check which of the two they actually mean before assuming shared funders, journals, or professional societies — the overlap in name is much larger than the overlap in substance.

How communication studies relates to neighboring disciplines

Communication studies’ boundaries with several neighboring fields are genuinely blurred, and departments in different universities draw the lines differently:

• Communication studies vs. sociology. Sociology studies groups, institutions, and social structures as its primary unit of analysis; communication studies asks the narrower question of how meaning is actually made and exchanged within and between those structures. Mass communication and organizational communication research overlap heavily with sociology of media and organizational sociology. See CASRAI’s sociology guide for the discipline-level comparison.
• Communication studies vs. psychology. Interpersonal communication and persuasion research overlap directly with social psychology — both study attitude change, self-disclosure, and relational behavior, often using the same experimental methods. The distinction is mostly institutional and disciplinary-training history rather than a hard conceptual line. See CASRAI’s psychology guide.
• Communication studies vs. linguistics. Linguistics studies the structure of language itself — phonology, syntax, semantics — largely independent of the social context in which it’s used. Communication studies is more interested in language (and nonverbal behavior) in use: what a given exchange accomplishes socially. The two fields converge most directly in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and pragmatics, which sit on the shared border between them. See CASRAI’s linguistics guide.
• Communication studies vs. journalism. Journalism is a professional practice field — reporting, editing, news production — often co-located with communication studies in the same academic unit (many “School of Communication” or “College of Media” structures house both). Communication studies is the scholarly study of communication processes, including the study of journalism and news media as an object of research, rather than the practice of producing news itself.
• Communication studies vs. political science. Political communication — campaign messaging, political rhetoric, media effects on public opinion, public diplomacy — is a substantial shared territory between the two fields; see CASRAI’s guide to international relations for the closely related study of communication across borders and between states.

Major sub-disciplines within communication studies

Communication studies is typically organized, taught, and hired into as a set of sub-fields rather than a single unified method:

• Interpersonal communication. How individuals build, maintain, and end relationships through communication — self-disclosure, conflict, nonverbal behavior, and relational dynamics between two or a small number of people.
• Rhetorical studies. The critical analysis of persuasive discourse — political speech, social movement rhetoric, argumentation — drawing on the field’s classical roots and continuing through contemporary public argument.
• Mass communication and media studies. How media institutions produce content and how audiences receive and are affected by it — media effects, media industries, and increasingly digital and social media platforms.
• Organizational communication. Communication within and between organizations — workplace relationships, organizational culture, internal messaging, and change communication.
• Health communication. How health information is designed, delivered, and understood — clinician-patient communication, public health campaigns, health literacy, and risk communication. One of the most heavily externally funded sub-fields, discussed further below.
• Political communication. Campaign communication, political rhetoric, media coverage of politics, and how political information reaches and moves citizens.
• Intercultural and international communication. How communication practices and meanings vary across cultures, and how communication functions across national and cultural boundaries, including public diplomacy.
• Communication technology and computer-mediated communication (CMC). How digital platforms, social media, and networked technologies reshape interpersonal and mass communication processes — one of the fastest-growing sub-fields as platforms and their effects continue to change.
• Public relations and strategic communication. The planning and management of communication between organizations and their publics — overlaps with both organizational communication and mass communication.
• Performance studies. Communication as embodied, staged, or ritualized performance — a smaller but historically rooted sub-field connected to the discipline’s roots in oral performance and rhetoric.

These sub-fields overlap constantly in practice — a health communication researcher studying a public health campaign’s social-media rollout is drawing on mass communication, CMC, and persuasion research simultaneously, which is typical rather than exceptional in this field.

The research funding landscape for communication studies

Communication studies funding is more fragmented than in a single-mission field, because the discipline’s sub-fields attach to very different funder priorities — health communication funds very differently from rhetorical studies or media studies, which is a genuine, practical research-administration consideration when identifying where a given communication project should apply.

In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of the discipline’s most externally-funded sub-field, health communication. The National Cancer Institute (NCI), through its Behavioral Research Program, has historically been the most prominent NIH funder of health communication research specifically — supporting work on how cancer risk, screening, and treatment information is designed and communicated to patients and the public. Other NIH institutes fund health communication research where it intersects their own disease or population mission: institutes focused on minority health and health disparities fund research on how health information reaches underserved populations; institutes focused on aging fund research on health communication with older adults; and institutes focused on substance use and addiction fund behavior-change communication research. NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), a trans-NIH coordinating office, also promotes behavioral and communication research relevant to health across institutes.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) does not have a dedicated “Communication” program the way it does for linguistics or psychology — communication-adjacent basic research is more often funded through NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) under programs such as Sociology and Political Science where a project’s core questions (media effects on public opinion, information diffusion, organizational communication) fit those programs’ scope, or through computing-adjacent programs where the research concerns human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication specifically. Communication researchers should expect to look for the right disciplinary fit at NSF case by case rather than a single home program.

Among private foundations, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a major funder of journalism and media-innovation research and practice, reflecting its founders’ background in newspaper publishing. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) funds health communication research as part of its broader public-health grantmaking. The Spencer Foundation (see CASRAI’s Spencer Foundation entry) funds education research and regularly supports research on communication and learning specifically. Outside the U.S., national research councils fund communication research as part of their broader social-science remit — in the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (see CASRAI’s ESRC dictionary entry) funds communication and media research alongside its other social-science portfolio.

Research methods, tools, and data

Communication studies draws methods from across the humanities and social sciences, reflecting its mixed disciplinary ancestry:

• Content analysis. Systematic, often quantitative coding of communication texts — news coverage, social media posts, advertising — to identify patterns in message content, a core method across mass communication and media studies.
• Survey research. Measuring attitudes, media use, and self-reported communication behavior across populations; central to media-effects and health-communication research in particular.
• Experimental design. Controlled experiments manipulating message features (framing, source credibility, medium) to test effects on attitudes, comprehension, or behavior — the method most directly shared with social psychology, typically run under IRB oversight when human participants are involved.
• Rhetorical and textual criticism. Close critical analysis of persuasive texts and discourse, the primary method of the rhetorical tradition — qualitative rather than quantitative, evaluated by argumentative rigor rather than statistical inference.
• Discourse and conversation analysis. Detailed analysis of naturally occurring talk or text, examining how meaning and social action are accomplished turn-by-turn — the method sitting most directly on the border with linguistics.
• Ethnography and participant observation. Immersive fieldwork studying communication practices in their natural organizational, cultural, or community setting.
• Social network analysis. Mapping communication and influence patterns across individuals or organizations, increasingly applied to online and social-media networks.
• Computational and “big data” methods. Large-scale automated text analysis, natural-language processing, and social-media data analysis, a fast-growing methodological strand as platform data has become available at scale.
• Statistical analysis software. Quantitative communication researchers commonly use the same general-purpose statistical packages as other social sciences — see CASRAI’s SPSS vs. R and SPSS vs. Stata comparisons.

Career and training pathways

Training in communication studies diverges depending on whether the goal is academic research, or an applied non-academic communication role.

• Undergraduate degree (B.A.). A bachelor’s in communication or communication studies is common preparation for graduate study but is also a widely used general-purpose degree for careers in public relations, marketing, human resources, and media production without further graduate training.
• Master’s degree. A terminal master’s (M.A.) supports some applied communication roles directly and is a common step before doctoral study; professional master’s programs in strategic communication or public relations are typically practice-oriented rather than research-oriented.
• Doctoral training (Ph.D.). Research-focused doctoral programs, typically titled Communication, Communication Studies, or Mass Communication, follow a structure broadly similar to other social-science doctorates: coursework in theory and methods, comprehensive/qualifying examinations, and an original dissertation. Programs vary in how strongly they emphasize the social-scientific versus rhetorical/critical tradition, which matters when choosing a program to match a specific research interest.
• Licensure. Communication studies itself has no licensure requirement — this is a key practical distinction from communication sciences and disorders (speech-language pathology and audiology), which does require clinical certification and state licensure. A communication studies Ph.D. qualifies someone for academic and research positions, not for any clinical scope of practice.
• Professional societies. The National Communication Association (NCA), one of the discipline’s oldest and largest professional associations, holds an annual convention and publishes major disciplinary journals spanning the field’s full range from rhetoric to social-scientific communication research. The International Communication Association (ICA) is the leading global association for social-scientific communication research specifically, publishing journals including the Journal of Communication. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is the primary scholarly association for journalism and mass communication researchers and educators specifically. All three hold annual conferences that function as key venues for research dissemination and networking.

Career destinations split broadly into academic/research positions (university faculty, government and foundation-funded research scientists), and applied non-academic roles spanning public relations and strategic communication, market and user-experience research, media analytics, health communication practice at public-health organizations, and government or nonprofit policy-communication roles.

Frequently asked questions

What is communication studies in simple terms?

Communication studies is the academic study of how people create, exchange, and interpret meaning through language, nonverbal behavior, and media — in one-on-one conversations, organizations, politics, and mass media — drawing on both humanities methods (rhetorical and textual analysis) and social-science methods (experiments, surveys, content analysis).

Is communication studies a science?

Part of it is. The field has a genuinely mixed methodological identity: its social-scientific tradition uses experiments, surveys, and quantitative content analysis in the same way psychology or sociology does, while its rhetorical and critical traditions use humanities-style textual and critical analysis. Neither tradition is more “real” than the other within the discipline — they study different aspects of the same broad subject.

What is the difference between communication studies and journalism?

Journalism is the professional practice of reporting and producing news; communication studies is the scholarly study of communication processes, which can include studying journalism and news media as a research subject. The two are frequently co-located in the same academic unit but are conceptually distinct.

What is the difference between communication studies and communication sciences and disorders?

Communication studies is an unlicensed academic field studying how communication functions socially, organizationally, and in media; communication sciences and disorders is a clinical health field (speech-language pathology and audiology) requiring clinical certification and state licensure to practice. The overlapping name is the main source of confusion — the fields, funders, and professional societies are otherwise separate.

Who funds communication studies research?

Funding is fragmented across the field’s sub-disciplines. In the U.S., NIH (particularly the National Cancer Institute) is the largest funder of health communication research specifically; NSF funds communication-adjacent basic research through its Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate rather than a dedicated communication program; and private foundations including the Knight Foundation (journalism/media), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (health communication), and the Spencer Foundation (education-related communication) fund specific slices of the field.

What jobs can you get with a communication studies degree?

Destinations range from academic and research positions to applied roles in public relations and strategic communication, market and user-experience research, media analytics, health communication, and government or nonprofit communication — the specific path depends heavily on degree level and sub-field focus.

Related CASRAI guides

This guide is part of a series covering major academic and scientific disciplines for researchers and research administrators. See the overview of the branches of science for how communication studies fits alongside other fields, and the companion guides to sociology, psychology, and linguistics for the disciplines communication studies borders most closely. For the closely related study of communication across borders and between states, see CASRAI’s guide to international relations, and for the shared information-and-media territory with library and information science, see CASRAI’s guide to library science.