The role of research in PR practice: the other side of the story, from the developing world (Ghana)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some leading public relations scholars in Western developed countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK, have observed that the use of research by public relations practitioners is generally not encouraging. This view is supported by research findings from a number of countries (see, for example, Grunig (1992), Tymson and Lazar (2006), Cutlip, Center and Broom (2006), Lindenmann (2003)). On the contrary, there is hardly any literature on the subject matter in developing countries, and particularly Africa. At best, what we have is undocumented anecdotal support of the notion that research hardly gets attention in public relation practice in developing countries. This paper is a small step in the direction of addressing the imbalance in the literature relating to the use of research in public relations or otherwise in developing countries. In relation to the research-practice nexus, this paper seeks to answer two main questions: (1) what are the views of practitioners’ concerning the use of research in public relations practice? (2) Is public relations practice in public enterprises in Ghana informed by research? Data was collected through a self-administered questionnaire and the sample was drawn from a population consisting of government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that were featured in Ghana’s 2007 budget statement. The findings show that contrary to popular belief, public relations practice within the public/government sector in Ghana is informed by research and that practitioners report that their research activities are aimed at consensus.
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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 | 0.042 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".