Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 319
The wrong question can be measured perfectly
Beltrán’s critique tests whether rigorous research is illuminating the local communication system or importing assumptions that predetermine what can be seen
Premise
A research design can be technically excellent and still answer the wrong society’s question. Luis Ramiro Beltrán’s 1976 critique of Latin American communication research targeted assumptions upstream of sampling, measurement, and statistics: what counts as the problem, who is treated as source or receiver, which outcome is desirable, and whose model of development is taken as normal.
The executive relevance is immediate whenever organizations replicate surveys, engagement models, adoption metrics, or communication frameworks across countries and populations. Method quality cannot rescue a construct whose social assumptions do not fit the setting.
What the model is: Alien Premises, Objects, and Methods in Knowledge →
Continue in the series
- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryParadigms, Traditions & Metatheories
- DomainAcross Cultures
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Paradigms, Traditions & Metatheories
Provides a broad intellectual perspective within which multiple concepts, theories or investigations are developed. Traditions carry histories and commitments; metatheories examine how theories themselves are organized or related.
- KnowledgeAlien Premises, Objects, and Methods