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.

A Sneak Peak into my Classmates Thoughts

Once again it is time to evaluated my classmates blogs. This time I decided to look at Kevin Mahoney and Kaylen McMullan's blogs. Kevin's blog is about social media in public relations while Kaylen's blog is about public relations in Spain.


Kevin's blog starts out with his introduction about what topic he chose to base his blog on which is social media in public relations. He starts out by talking about the history about public relations and how it has changed since then. His next two blogs discuss research effects public relations and how social media has become a necessary component for public relations. In each post he gives examples to back up his information to show how important social media and research is in the public relations field. His next blog was where he gave his opinion about our classmate's blogs. In his next couple of blogs throughout the month of October he discusses  how social media is taking over the public relations field that it is an essential thing ti know how to work and be a part of in the pr world. I think Kevin's blog was very interesting  and informative. 


Kaylen's first blog is about what her blog's focus is on which is public relations in Spain. She talks about the reason why she chose this topic because she is going to study abroad there in the spring.  Her next blog is about the difference of public relations in different countries. Her following blog was about the HELENA study which stands for the healthy lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence. It's goal is to promote a healthy lifestyle to children and young adults. Her
fifth blog had to do with crisis management in Spain she gave example of a study done about crisis management in Belgium, Spain, and France. In her seventh blog she defines what qualitative research is. I feel Kaylen's blog was informative and kept to her topic well. 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research  is used to  understand a behavior in a natural setting. Qualitative research can also be used by using written documents and through case studies. Qualitative research is mostly gathered from observations, interviews, focus groups, and non-statistical. These techniques are great to use to do research in public places where you don't want the participants to know that they are involved so you can get more truthful results.


Observations is when you look at what is happening rather than asking participants questions directly. This method helps you to better understand behaviors and is helpful to understand populations better. An example is when you sit on the quad and observe how many people are wearing greek letters and from that observation come to the conclusion how many students are in greek life on campus and which sorority or fraternity on campus brothers or sisters wear their letters the most.


Interviews are used to provide detailed data from the participants about their specific experiences and opinions. They are usually open ended questions to make the participants have a more in depth answer. 


Focus Groups are usually 8 to 12 people that are randomly selected but share the same experience or characteristic relevant to the evaluation. They are used to gain insight used to create ideas, solve problems. They are usually asked open-ended questions or topics to cause discussion among the group.  An example of a focus group is when 8 to 10 women ages 20 to 25 are brought to a room and discuss what their favorite type of lipstick is and why they buy a certain. They always discuss what they dislike and what they would change in certain advertisements to make them buy a certain product. The results will be used to create an ad by a certain make up company to better target that age group. 

Analyzing Classmates Blogs

This time around when looking for classmates blogs to comment on I chose to look at Lindsey Hock and Samantha Roman blogs. Lindsey's blog focuses on NBC News Studios while Samantha's blog focuses on the fashion industry. 

Lindsey's blog starts off with discussing what she is going to write her blog about. She starts off by describing how she spent her summer working at NBC News studios and what she did while working there. She ends the post by taking about how it relates to what we are learning in PR class. Her second post was about ethics relating to “NBC Dateline" particularly the show "To Catch a Predator". She talks a bot about what the series is and then goes into whether to show is ethical or not and states her feelings on ethics. For her third post she focused on PR research specifically relating to the 2008 and 2010 Olympics and how NBC is up to date with technology since it took in a count new technology when figuring out how many people watched the Olympics.  Her fourth post was her looking at classmate's blogs and her thoughts about them. Her fifth post was about unobtrusive research and how content analysis is a important part of NBC News Publicly Department.

While reading Lindsey's post about looking at classmate's blogs I stumbled upon Samantha's blog. In her first post she discusses what her blog's focus will be which is the fashion industry and how she will compare the good and bad PR in the industry.  In her second post she talks about ethics in fashion and gives the example about unfair treatment of workers in Bangladesh and how most of the fashion industry uses these workers who are paid below the minimum wage yet claim to be humanitarians.  In her third post she writes about PR Research in the fashion industry she used the example of  Ann Taylor Loft how they posted pictures on their facebook about new their new silk cargo pants that featured a tall, skinny, blonde model  and people commented saying the pants only look good on a size 2. Ann Taylor's PR department responded by posting pictures of a three women from their office of different sizes to show that women of any size would look flattering in the pants.

In her fourth post she discussed other classmate's blogs that she read and gave her opinion about them. Her fifth post was about unobtrusive research in the fashion industry and gave the example about shoplifting how a study was done that watched a store over time and they found that most of the time the shoplifters got away with it because the store staff weren't watching. Also that if fellow shopper saw it happening they almost never said anything to stop the theft.

I feel that both these classmate's blogs were very good and very informative. Lindsey's blog was very interesting with her pictures and I felt she tied the theme of the post well to NBC each week. Samantha's blog was very interesting to me since I love fashion and the fashion industry and was at first going to also do my blog about the fashion industry but decided to write mine about a PR company instead.  

Unobtrusive Measures in PR Research

Unobtrusive research is a type of research that allows you to conduct your research with out interfering with the participates of the research. By using this type of research researchers can use more imaginative ways to conduct research. Unobtrusive research can also help you to cut down on biases that occur in research.  It is also cheaper and it allows you to observe subjects naturally. 

The biggest thing people have against unobtrusive research is whether it is ethical or not. It can be seen as unethical since you are finding out information about people without their permission. On the other hand the information that they are obtaining is open to the public, like criminal records and people's photo's online. 

There are three different types unobtrusive research they are indirect measures, Content analysis and Secondary analysis. Indirect measures is is an unobtrusive measure that occurs naturally in a research context. The researcher is able to collect the data without introducing any formal measurement procedure.  An example of indirect measurements is when they wanted to find out the popularity of exbits in a musmuem, the musmuem put down new tiles over a period of time they analyzed the wear and tear of the tiles since it shows that alot of people were standing there looking at the exhibit. 

Content analysis is  is the analysis of text documents. The analysis can be quantitative, qualitative or both. The problem with content analysis is you are limited to the types of information available in text form, you have to be especially careful with sampling in order to avoid bias. and  you have to be careful about interpreting results of automated content analyses. 

Secondary analysis, like content analysis, makes use of already existing sources of data. Examples of this is the census bureau data, crime records and standardized testing data.