To sum up my major concerns with self-report research in communication, I worry that much knowledge
critical to understanding communication is of a sort that cannot be understood with self-reports methods.
Communication researchers would be well served by devoting more efforts in observing actual communication
as it happens and less time having people recall or imagine communication. Second, even for topics
well suited to self-report measurement, I worry that the scales used to measure communication variables
are not properly validated and yield scores that measure something other than intended. The net result, I
believe, is a slowing of progress. Much published research does not tell us very much, or worse yet, some
research actively provides misinformation about communication.