The anxious profession : a study of competencies, qualifications, and education in Canadian public relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public relations' anxiety in identifying as a specialized profession has been documented since its modern foundation in the early 20th century. One of the root causes of public relations' anxiety is its lack of empirical and theory building knowledge, due in part to Canadian universities refusal to actively teach it at the undergraduate and graduate-level until the beginning of the 21st century. Through interviews with 22 leading practitioners and academics and a survey of 231 practitioners, this study provides an overview and insights into the current state of education, competencies, and accreditation in Canadian public relations. A consensus is found amongst practitioners and academics regarding the value of specialized education and strategic thinking skills for contemporary practitioners. A discernable skillset for public relations practitioners is also found and included in the curriculums of most of post-secondary programs. Despite this, public relations' anxiety is evident within its accreditation and certification programs which after four decades remain unrecognized by the industry, practitioners, and academics. However, the recent growth of graduate-level public relations appears poised to alleviate public relations' anxiety by offering practitioners access to internationally recognized credentials as well as contributing to the establishment of a theoretical and empirical foundation of knowledge for the practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".