The piece of evidence which best demonstrates my ability to achieve the third learning

objective of the communication discipline, to engage in communication inquiry, is the relational

satisfaction portion of the literary review I had written for my Communication Research
Methods group project during my first semester of senior year at Bryant University. For this
group project, we were assigned the task of designing, executing and reporting a quantitative
research project in the form of a scholarly communication journal article. In order to do so, it
involved massive amounts of research and the gathering of data to answer a question about
communication, while at the same time contributing to the body of knowledge of the field of
communication. The contents of the journal article include an abstract, introduction, literary
review, rationale and hypothesis, method section, results, and discussion, relating to our topic,
the relationship between communication apprehension and romantic relational satisfaction. First,
we had to formulate a research topic. Then, research of previous literature was conducted to see
if our topic has been used for a scholarly communication journal article in the past. Next, we had
to identify the reason why the topic was chosen, while identifying gaps and weaknesses in
previous studies to justify the investigation of the new topic. Then, we had to identify our
strategy for gathering the quantitative data, along with the required supporting materials and
measuring instruments to be used. This was followed by actually going out and using the
measuring instruments to gather data from people regarded as research subjects, in order to
report our results of the research findings from the test study. Finally, the journal article comes
together in the discussion section by drawing conclusions and explaining the implications of
these conclusions on the topic, as well as the general body of the field of communication.
Although, as a group, we completed the scholarly journal article in its entirety, in order to
demonstrate my ability to achieve the third learning objective of the communication discipline, I

will use the portion of the literary review that discusses relational satisfaction because it was my
largest contribution to the project. The relational satisfaction portion of the literary review
demonstrates the first three main goals of the third learning objective, which are to interpret,
evaluate and apply communication scholarship. It identifies a number of different constructs of
relational satisfaction that are associated with the positive and negative feelings associated with a
relationship, as well as communication apprehension and anxiety. The research conducted, and
the relational satisfaction portion of the literary review, were used to find a correlation between
communication apprehension and relational satisfaction. In order to write the literary review of a
scholarly journal article, you must interpret and evaluate previous research conducted on the
topic in order to apply this information to the specific research topic at hand. By applying
previous research on communication apprehension and relational satisfaction, including three
primary constructs of relational satisfaction that relate to communication apprehension,
predictions regarding the correlation between the two were able to become formulated. Although
I did not write the communication apprehension portion of the literary review, the combination
of the communication apprehension and relational satisfaction portions were used to later
contribute to the final two main goals of the third learning objective through the completion of
the scholarly journal article. The final two main goals of the third learning objective are, to
formulate questions appropriate for communication scholarship and engage in communication
scholarship using the research traditions of the discipline. The two goals are exemplified by the
forming of our hypothesis and conduction of our qualitative research study. The completion of
the scholarly journal article, specifically my portion on relational satisfaction, effectively
demonstrates my ability to achieve the third learning objective.