Approaches to mass communication educational researches in universities and polytechnics of Nigeria

In Nigeria, many Universities and Polytechnics offer Mass Communication as a course for many of its students. But the different education institutions find many difficulties to classify mass communication as a discipline in the humanities, arts or the social sciences. There is no doubt that this quagmire has affected the direction and pattern of research teachings, literature and practice. This has called for the unbundling of Mass Communication courses from the arts, humanities or social science faculties or colleges. This work is to take an analysis of past mass communication research academic projects to establish the most frequent methods, theories and sectors of mass communication researches by students of Wellspring University and Heritage Polytechnic located in Southern Nigeria for generalization of findings. The research method adopted was content analysis to obtain quantitative data from 155 copies of past academic students projects. Findings was that 121 or 78 percent of projects was by choice of survey methods while 91 or 59 percent prefer social responsibility theory in mass communication researches. Recommendations are that tertiary institutions should expand the scope of teaching mass communication with varieties of research methods and theories to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of Mass Communication as a distinct academic discipline.