The Ph.D. program in Communication, Social Research, and Marketing offers three specialized tracks: Media and Communication Studies, Research Methods in Social Sciences, and Marketing. The program is designed to train scholars and researchers capable of critically engaging with the evolving theories, methodologies, and analytical tools across these fields, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and methodological rigor. The research areas covered by each track are outlined below.
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES addresses audience, television, and media studies; communication, politics, citizenship, and participation; youth cultures, socialization, and cultural consumption; journalism and information ecosystems; languages, narratives, imaginaries, and transmedia storytelling; gender and media studies; and digital media, including platforms, algorithms, and datafication processes.
RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES explores historiographical perspectives on the discipline, including micro-macro relations and the development of standardized survey instruments; analytical sociology and theory of action, focusing on experimental and quasi-experimental designs as well as non-standard, qualitative, and hermeneutic methods for data collection; networks and social structure, emphasizing social explanation, prediction, and simulation, along with focused interviews and focus groups; social constructionism, integrating quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods; the study of social representations, addressing issues of validity and reliability, and employing techniques and models for quantitative research design such as principal component analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, cluster analysis, logistic regression, and path analysis; and cognitive and mental processes, including generalization of results, representativeness, sampling strategies, data processing and synthesis from indicators to indices, social network analysis, and agent-based simulation.
MARKETING focuses on marketing and management for business administration; consumer behavior and consumption, covering all activities related to the choice, purchase, use, and post-purchase of goods and services; the influence of consumer emotions, attitudes, and preferences on purchasing behavior; customer experience and the customer journey in relation to the Internet of Things (IoT); brand and brand management; innovation and digital transformation in business models and enterprise management; internal marketing and the role of human capital in organizational management; the application of technology and IoT across various sectors; and services and service ecosystems.
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