8.) When designing research to examine the agenda setting function of the mass media, McCombs and Shaw developed ways to observe and measure both the public agenda - which they did by asking people about the issues they considered to be most important - and the media agenda - which they did by recording the prominence of news stories about those issues in the news products those people reported consuming. That they collected data about variables that they could both observe and measure best illustrates the _____ characteristic of scientific research.

a)empirical

b)objective

c)public

d)cumulative

e)systematic