History of Research and Discovery in the MCM Program

Our first research initiative, the McMaster Comms Management Lab has deep roots. In 2008, Drs. Philip Savage and Alex Sévigny, APR, co-founded the COMM-Lab: Communications Metrics Lab. Its mandate was to enable empirical communications research, both qualitative and quantitative. The Metrics Lab created many opportunities for McMaster undergraduate students, as they didn’t have a graduate program at the time. Two notable research endeavours were:

• A thorough content analysis of Question Period in the federal House of Commons, which resulted in a civility index, presented at Canadian Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences in St. John, New Brunswick in 2011; and
• A McMaster Media Study, which was an annual, student-led survey of McMaster students’ attitudes towards uses for and gratifications derived from various media.

In 2014, the Lab’s physical space was lost when its home at Wentworth House was demolished to enable the construction of L.R. Wilson Hall. The lab moved to the (not very) temporary Building 19, where it stayed until the space was rendered inoperable by a flood in 2017. At that time, Drs. Savage and Sévigny decided that perhaps the COMM-Lab had run its course and suspended operations.

Now, the McMaster COMM-Lab is back, in a new incarnation, ready to welcome industry partnerships from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. The new MCM Lab welcomes the growing MCM alumni community to become affiliates and to form research collaborations with their faculty and friends at their alma mater, McMaster University!