El conocimiento de la investigación académica por parte de los profesionales universitarios de la industria de la comunicación

Abstract

For many scholars, the need of academic research for the development of any profession is unquestionable. However, the professionals of the communicative field do not always value this research, because they do not know its meaning or because they do not understand its utility. 667 This lack of understanding is natural among the professionals with a technical training. But the practitioners with university formation should have, among another typical knowledge of higher education, some basic notions of academic research and its methods, because only with this intellectual grounding it will be possible for them to value research as an important instrument to improve different professions. With this study we have tried to know if the professionals of communication recieve, during their university studies, an appropiate training about research and its methods. With this objective we have analized 21 curricula of Journalism degree, 24 of Advertising and Public Relations degree and 24 of Audio-visual Communication degree. The results show that the knowledge of the professionals of communication about academic research and its methods is poor and it is not enough to understand the importance of these subjects for the develpment of the professional sector. In this context, the only way to avoid that the future practitioners ignore or underestimate academic resesarch is to implant new curricula with obligatory subjects, for every univesities and degrees of this field, related to research and its methods.