Measuring/Measures

Respected and successful public relations scholars and practitioners alike acknowledge the important role measurement plays in communication effectiveness and management. Essential to communication practitioners who employ one-way, two-way, asymmetrical, and symmetrical communication functions, research informs the decision-making processes in successful organizations. Measurement can be used to offer both insight and foresight and is often used to shape strategic initiatives based on the needs of publics. Measuring organizational communication is often broadly categorized as informal, formal, quasi-formal, or mixed. The two paradigms of research include quantitative and qualitative. No method is better than the other; rather, they are complementary.

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. Anchored in the foundation that the physical world 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, [Page 517]and others. Conversely, constructivist or naturalistic theorists were loosely labeled 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 group, 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, “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 be constructed only 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 try to control for bias, to select a systematic sample, and to be as “objective” as possible when analyzing the data. This is much different in qualitative research, where the researcher will interact with those they study.

Researchers from both camps claim objectivity, but mean different things. The quantitative approach takes objective to mean what 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 one's knowledge and experiences of the world and place in it. According to the norms of qualitative research, then, the researcher is not separate from the research process.

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