Research is an activity of knowing, with the core
objectives of to find solutions to problems and find
answers to questions through the application of a
reliable and consistent procedure. To be reliable and
consistent, research method must be accessible,
transparent, systematic, verifiable, objective,
transferable, cumulative and rigorous. It is useful for
research method to meet the above stated criteria
because as a public activity, research procedure
must be clear in structure, in process and in
outcome—such as the processes must be opened to
scrutiny by others. Research in Communication and
media studies is an ongoing activity and it is
constantly evolving and moving from questions about
the use of the medium to the questions of
technological improvement of the medium to
profitably serve the users of the medium, who are also
constantly changing in terms of demographics, taste,
orientation and values. The focus of this paper
therefore, is to determine the research methodology
which is most commonly used in communication and
media studies. It is also to examine the influence of
single and multiple authors in the choice of either the
qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods.
Employing descriptive quantitative design, the
authors used content analysis as a tool to code and
analysed the data set. Published scholarly articles
available on Google scholar between 2020 and 2021
constituted the study population. Taro Yamane
formula was used to draw a sample size of 392 from a
population of 21,000. Findings showed that scholars in the field prefer quantitative methodology, and multiple authors were standard among the publications in the period under review. It is recommended that communication researchers explore the possibility of adopting alternative approaches other than quantitative methods. Regarding the debate on the number of authors as it concerns scholarly articles, it is submitted that more research is needed to ascertain further benefits of singular and multiple authors, aside from the obvious advantages from both sides currently being put forward.