Public Relations Metrics

Research and Evaluation

Betteke van Ruler, Ana Tkalac Vercic, Dejan Vercic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135593261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

Responding to the increasing need in academia and the public relations profession, this volume presents the current state of knowledge in public relations measurement and evaluation. The book brings together ideas and methods that can be used throughout the world, and scholars and practitioners from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa are represented.

1 Public Relations Metrics

Measurement and Evaluation—An Overview

Betteke van Ruler, Ana Tkalac Verčič, and Dejan Verčič

1. Introduction

As Botan and Taylor (2004: 645) state, public relations is both a professional practice and an academic field. In both communities research is done but this is not necessarily the same kind of research. A recent dissertation on the use of research in public relations practice in Ireland (McCoy, 2006) confirmed what has been known from many other studies in other countries as well: a common measurement tool for doing research in public relations practice is the “eyes and ears” method—talking to an unsystematic selection of members of the public or the media, reading some reports and drawing conclusions on the basis of these reports, or listening to solicited or unsolicited feedback from superiors or members of a public without systematically planning the research or analyzing the results. This is what Pavlik (1987:91) called “seat-of-the-pants” research; Broom and Dozier (1990) have called it “informal research” and Rühl (in this book) terms it “laymen’s research.” The use of these kinds of laymen’s research might be due to the immaturity of the profession and its rapid growth, but it is detrimental to its prestige and its status, in practice as well as in the scholarly community.

Already in 1987, Pavlik concluded that half of all the systematic research on public relations was applied research, dealing with various communication techniques and program areas of public relations, and that most of the other research was introspective, touching many areas including education, ethics, roles, etc. Evaluation research gets increased attention, he foresaw in 1987, but “there is no answer to the broad question: What can public relations contribute to overall organizational effectiveness?” and he suggested focusing on relationships (p. 122). Some years before, in 1984, Ferguson, too, promoted relationships as the unit of analysis and a focus on theorizing (see Botan & Taylor, 2004:648). Almost twenty years later Heath (2001:3) concluded that the concept of relationships has become widely discussed and studied and is seen as a key concept in public relations (see also J. Grunig, 1992; Ledingham & Bruning, 2000).

Botan and Hazleton (2006) stated that public relations research has matured. Yet, in a critical response to public relations theory building so far, Cheney and Christensen (2001) speculated about “a Western managerial and rationalist bias in public relations research” (p. 182).

Apart from the discipline’s youth, the problems with research and evaluation in public relations might also be caused by a lack of conceptualization, according to J. E. Grunig (in this book). We would suggest that there is not only a lack of conceptualization but probably also a lack of epistemological and methodological foundations, which provide the calculus for conceptualization, and surely a lack of diversity in this respect. The developments of these foundations and of appropriate measurement tools are to be seen as an important goal of the scholarly community.

2. The Territory of Public Relations Research

Just like Pavlik in 1987, Botan and Hazleton (1989) concluded that public relations theory was in an underdeveloped condition at the time. Vasquez and Taylor (2000), Sallot, Lyon, Acosta-Alzuru, and Jones (2003), and Botan and Taylor (2004) could be much more positive. Their overviews of research done until the millennium change prove that the field is expanding. Vasquez and Taylor (2000) reported seven areas of public relations research: two-way symmetrical communication; roles; issues management; negotiation; publics in the public relations process; international public relations; and public relations and communications technology. They repeat Pasadeos, Reufro, and Hanily (1999) in their conclusion that “it would help the field greatly if some young scholars were to break with the current mold and undertake more audience centered research” (p. 48) and followed Pasadeos et al. in their call for topical diversity of scholarship and, consequently, a need for more diversity in methods (Vasquez & Taylor, 2000:334). Botan and Taylor (2004) concluded that the most striking trend in public relations has been the movement from a functionalist perspective to a co-creational one, focusing on publics as co-creators of meaning and emphasizing the building of relationships with all publics. They, too, lamented that there is hardly any diversity.

Botan and Hazleton (2006:7–8) developed an interesting hypothesis of the one-dimensionality of topical diversity in public relations research so far by using Kuhn’s concept of anomaly (1970). An anomaly is an unexpected fact or a research finding that a paradigm in its original form did not anticipate. If the paradigm can be adjusted to incorporate the anomaly, normal science may continue. Failure to adequately incorporate anomalies can result in a crisis, e.g., a widely spread recognition of the failures of a paradigm. Botan and Hazleton (p. 9) claim that public relations scholars have not (yet) identified major anomalies that existing models fail to address. We agree with them that it makes no sense to develop alternatives just to replace former paradigms. Instead, the development of additional and different theories of public relations needs to be encouraged, as well as the engagement of all scholars in frequent and public debates over the merits and weakness of all theories of public relations.

We are grateful that we are able to contribute to this by providing challenging ideas on epistemological and conceptual topics in public relations research as well as insights into developments in Europe and Africa in this book.

3. The Basics of Research

The journal overviews and readers on the development of public relations theory are focused on the area of research topics and the concepts in use, not on the research measurement techniques. The first book on how to conduct public relations research was Public Relations Research of Brody and Stone (1989). This book was not meant for scholars but for students and practitioners, and was, consequently, very elementary. The second one came out only one year later—Broom and Dozier’s Using Research in Public Relations: Applications to Program Management (1990)—which focused on the same audience and was a reader friendly research book: “friendly to students and practitioners who fear of numbers, have math anxiety or say they have little aptitude for research” (p. xiii).

The scholarly community kept silent in this respect until 2002, when Don Stacks published his Primer of Public Relations Research (2002). He laments (p. v) that the idea for writing this book came up over a decade ago, but that no publisher was willing to take a chance on public relations research. His statement, “My treatment is based on the belief that public relations practitioners need to understand the research process—not that they will conduct research daily (some will), but they will have to make important and informed decisions about hiring research firms, evaluating their proposals and end products, as well as helping to determine how that research benefits the ‘bottom line’” (p. vi), shows that this book is, again, an introductory book. He refers to the many research methods books that are available in sociology, psychology, business and communication to the reader who wants a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between theory, method, and analytical tool, e.g., to methodology. We would suggest that a mature field of research has its own advanced books in this respect and we see a need for the development of books that go further than just elementary research methods.

The purpose of research is to build theories to solve the problems researchers face in working in a domain (Littlejohn, 1995). The core question for every public relations researcher is how public relations works, what it does in, to and for organizations, publics, or in the public arena, e.g., society at large. The answer to this question depends on the methodologies the researcher uses. Behind this term stands the “personal biography of the researcher: he or she approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology, analysis)” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000:18–19). Whether predefined by Weltanschauung or constructed in its peer group (cf. Sallot et al., 2003:30), our understanding of phenomena is built on certain underlying philosophical assumptions (Foreman-Wernet, 2002:6). These philosophical assumptions and the subsequent chosen methodology, including a set of theories, conceptualization, operationalization and appropriate methods, form the researcher’s calculus for doing research. A mature discipline provides as many calculi as can be invented. So, functionalistic oriented calculi should have a place under the public relations research sun, as well as constructivistic ones in its natural or most radical forms.

4. A Public Relations Research Grid

Public relations is where management and communication meet. As a human activity it includes everything we know about human behavior; as an organizational activity it encompasses everything we know about organizational behavior; and as a social activity it subsumes everything we know about social and societal behavior. When observing public relations and reflecting on it, we can use all the knowledge available in modern academe and in practical use. From such a point of view, we know in principle everything there is to know about public relations research and evaluation. However, in practice, we still have a long way to go.

Biology, chemistry, and physics do not make up medical science, much less a physician. In the same way, psychology, sociology, communication, and political science do not make up public relations science, much less a competent practitioner and even less so a competent public relations organization. Research on, for, and in public relations is needed if it is ever to become an equal partner at the top board table and an equal member of academia. As Botan and Hazleton (2006) showed in the introductory chapter of their second book on public relations theory—entitled, aptly, Public Relations Theory—positions in public relations have increased substantially in both business practice and academic teaching since their first Public Relations Theory book (Botan & Hazleton, 1989); but, again, we are not there yet.

Fifteen years ago, J. Grunig and colleagues made an overview of research findings while building his “excellence theory” (J. Grunig, 1992). We believe that our book contributes to this body of growing knowledge.

Public relations research territory is wide open. To navigate through it, in Chapter 5 of this book, J. Grunig proposes to distinguish between research in, on, and for public relations, and to observe it on four levels: the program level, the functional level, the organizational level, and the societal level. We suggest that two more levels of analysis may be useful: the project level and the individual level. Merging J. Grunig’s proposal with our ideas, we organized and visualized types of research in, on, and for public relations in a public relations research grid (see Table 1.1). This grid supports our earlier observation that “a feasible concept of public relations needs more indicators than relationships alone to reflect the plural nature of its service to organizations and its publics” (van Ruler & Verčič, 2005: 240).

Table 1.1 Public relations research grid

Let us first explain the grid’s structure and then its eighteen constitutive cells. We can research public relations on at least six different levels moving from less to more complex: individual, project, program, function, organization, and society as a whole. These levels of reality and analysis can overlap, but they present different ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions. We should be able to differentiate between them and see them separately before we integrate them into a holistic picture. On each of these levels we can research what we can learn about public relations in order to understand what it is, where it comes from, and what it does (the “On” column). For each of these levels we can develop research to produce knowledge for use in public relations (the “For” column), and we can observe research done in public relations practice (the “In” column). Six levels of research by three types of purpose (on the role and consequences of public relations, for the development of public relations technology, and in the execution of public relations practice) give us eighteen different research situations. We can assume that public relations research is not equally distributed across these cells—we have not yet investigated that. We now turn to a detailed description of each cell.

(1) SOC-O

Research on public relations on a societal level studies what public relations means to contemporary society and for the future(s). (From a present point of view, the future exists as a multitude of possibilities, which is why we talk about future in the plural.) A textbook explanation at this level of conceptualization is positive: “The practice serves society by mediating conflict and by building the consensual relationships needed to maintain social order. Its social function—its mission—is accomplished when it replaces ignorance, coercion, and intransigence with knowledge, compromise, and adjustment” (Cutlip, Center, & Broom, 2000:25). Monographs studying public relations at this level of analysis are critical and see public relations as corrupt for political democracy and economic freedoms. Mayhew’s (1997) study on the new public and Olasky’s (1987) work on corporate public relations are two examples of this type of research.

(2) ORG-O

Research on public relations on an organizational level studies what public relations contributes to contemporary organizations and their competences. On an organizational level we need research on what publ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Public Relations Metrics: Measurement and Evaluation—An Overview
• PART I Fundamentals of Public Relations Research
• PART II Public Relations Methods, Cases, and Specific Topics