Lessons Learned and Simple Hopes: Implications of the Pandemic for Communication Scholarship

Communication scholars demonstrated a remarkable level of methodological creativity to overcome the restrictions on conducting research necessitated by the pandemic. This methodological creativity allowed us to provide answers to many critical questions that arouse during the pandemic. Now the risk is that scholars will diminish data gathered during the pandemic as tainted by pandemic-related confounds. Certainly, the pandemic offered many threats to the internal validity of research, but this should be embraced as an opportunity to learn from these unique confounds to increase the specificity of our theories.