Measuring/Measures

Respected and successful public relations scholars and practitioners alike acknowledge the important role measurement plays in communication effectiveness and management. Research is used to achieve insight and foresight and to shape strategic initiatives based on the needs of publics. Measuring organizational communication is often broadly categorized as informal, formal, and quasiformal or mixed. The two paradigms of research include quantitative and qualitative. No method is better than the other; rather, they are complementary to one another.

Contemporary discussions of public relations research are rooted in the late-19th-century debates about whether or not researchers could or should borrow investigative methods from the physical sciences to understand the human and social world. The foundation of the physical world, measurement was mastered intellectually and materially to a greater extent than the social world; positivist theorists, including Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Emile Durkheim, worked in the empiricist tradition established by John Locke, Isaac Newton, and others. Conversely, constructivist or naturalistic theorists were loosely labeled as idealists. These scholars, including Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber, found their philosophical origins in a Kantian tradition.

Within these broadly defined paradigms, communication research seeks to explain, describe or explore the phenomenon chosen for study. Composed of both theories and methods, paradigms help us understand phenomena by advancing assumptions, asserting how research should be conducted, and defining legitimate problems, solutions, and criteria of “proof.”

Measurement is generally the assigning of either words (qualitative) or numbers (quantitative) to a phenomenon. A qualitative study explores a specific program, event, situation, person or groups, and it usually applies only to the specific matter being studied. The results cannot be generalized. Those projects that seek to learn about regularities are usually deemed quantitative.

The different research paradigms hold different assumptions, which include ontological, epistemological, axiological, rhetorical, and methodological approaches. The ontological assumption asks: [Page 545]What is reality? For the quantitative researcher, reality is objective, independent of the researcher, and can usually be measured objectively as well. Reality for the qualitative researcher can only be constructed by those involved in the research, whether it is the researcher, those people being investigated, or the reader(s) interpreting the study.

For a quantitative study, the epistemological supposition—or the relationship of the researcher to those or that being studied—is that the researcher maintains distance and is left independent of the research subject(s). This is why researchers will try to control for bias, try to select a systematic sample, and be as “objective” as possible when analyzing the data. This is much different in qualitative research where researchers will interact with those they study.

Researchers from both camps claim objectivity, but by that they mean different things. The quantitative approach assumes objective to mean that which is outside us or in the world of facts, independent of the knower—seeing the world free from one's own personal place or situation. To the qualitative researcher, objectivity means that how one views the world is based on our knowledge and experiences of the world and our places in it. According to the norms of qualitative research, then, the researcher is not separate from the research process.

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