Last Post

The time has come. A whole eleven weeks have past and it is time for my last blog post. The topic of my last post is dedicated to analyzing my classmates blogs once again. The blogs I chose to look at are Jordana Carideo and Lisa Perez . Jordana's blog is based on the American Cancer Society and Lisa's blog is about the entertainment industry. 


I liked Jordana's blog a lot she kept the main focus of her blog throughout all her posts and had really good visuals to go along with the topics. I learned about how the American Cancer Society uses different methods one in particular that stuck out to me was research since it is huge for them since they use it to find a cure for cancer. 


I liked Lisa's blog a lot too she has a humorous type of writing I feel which made reading her blog very enjoyable. She was about to relate the topics very well to make them interesting and relatable  to our age group. One example is how she related unobtrusive research to the paparazzi constantly following celebrities.  

Experimental Research

In order to find out research sometimes you need to use experimental research. In experimental research the participants are put into two group without them knowing which one they are in. They are either put into the control group and the experimental group. There are two different ways that an experiment can be preformed one is blind and the other is double blind. Blind is when the participants don't know who is in the experimental or control group but the people conducting the test do. Double blind is when both the participants and the people conducting the test don't know who is in the control and who is in the experimental group. Double blind experiment is better because it avoids bias.  


Another way to conduct experimental research is by using quasi-experiment research which  the subjects to be observed are not randomly assigned to different groups but actually grouped together for their similar traits. One type of quasi - experiment is a panel study where people are put into groups and are studied over a long period of time by using a survey or diaries that they keep. 
 

There are nine threats to experimental research. they are:

 

-History: pretest and posttest-over time

-Maturation: subtle aging effects.

-Testing effects: changes in posttest because of experimental treatment

-Instrumentation: differing in questions and researcher administer

-Statistical regression: extremes in the beginning, no higher measurement

-Selection: randomizing

-Experimental mortality: participants dropping out of study

-Interaction effects: anticipate interactions

Survey Research

Survey is one of the important ways of research in public relations. Survey's allow you to get an idea of what a large  population of people think by asking a small sample of people. There are two different types of surveys questionnaire and  interviews. Questionnaires are used more often than interviews because the are less expensive, less biased and easier to get people to participate since you can send them through mail and email or ask them over the phone. 

There are different types of questionnaires there is mail in surveys, they are relatively inexpensive to administer. You can send the exact same instrument to a wide number of people. They allow the respondent to fill it out at their own convenience. The next type is group administered questionnaires where the questionnaire is given in a group setting to make it more convenience for the people giving the questionnaire. The third type is household drop-off where the the questionnaire is dropped off at the person's house and example is when people go door to door dropping off the U.S. Census. 

There are two different types of interviews there is the personal interview where they are given in  one on one setting. The other type is telephone interviews where people are contacted over the phone where is an instant gathering of information.