This study aims to focus on the research activities among tasks of PR practitioners. PR research helps to find target publics for problem solving, favorable and unfavorable factors in and outside the organization regarding problems of organization to ...
This study aims to focus on the research activities among tasks of PR practitioners. PR research helps to find target publics for problem solving, favorable and unfavorable factors in and outside the organization regarding problems of organization to PR practitioners and provides the grounds for evaluating effectiveness of PR program. In this regard, research can be regarded as the core factor for approaching PR in terms of process and problem solution. Despite such important role of the research in PR, however, there is no sufficient study on research activities of PR practitioners in Korea or study on PR research in Korea.
Regarding that it requires study on research activities of PR practitioners in Korea, this study examined how PR practitioners perform research activities and which factors affect their research activities. As a result of analyzing precedent studies, research activities of PR practitioners can be diagnosed based on research objective and method. Conditions of organization and features of PR practitioners are presented as factors affecting research activities. This study includes completion of formal PR education and PR experience to the features of PR practitioners, lack of time and restricted viewpoint of the organization on the PR to the conditions of organization. Following are the study subjects through this. First, does completion of formal PR education affects the research objective and method of PR practitioners? Second, does PR experience affect the research objective and method of PR practitioners? Third, does restricted viewpoint of the organization on the PR affect the research objective and method of PR practitioners? Forth, does lack of time affect the research objective and method of PR practitioners?
Questionnaire consists of questions identified from the studies on factors affecting the research activities and the studies that examine objective and method of research. Survey was carried out on PR practitioners of 100 companies selected by systematic sampling among top 1000 companies designated by the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry. For analysis of study subject, paired samples t-test was used to analyze which research objective and method were mainly used. Multiple regression was used to analyze effects of 4 factors on research objective and method.
As a result, there was no significant difference in the use of one-way PR objective research and two-way PR objective research by PR practitioners, but two-way PR objective research has been less used up to now. With regard to research method, clip-file research, informal research and formal research have been used in the order named so that research activities have been carried out focusing on one research method rather than using various research methods extensively.
With regard to influence of factors, all factors were found not to have influence on research objective and method of PR practitioners in Korea. First of all, PR experience have negative effects on two-way PR objective research and formal research method, which means that it was not long before function of PR department in the organization began to be changed to two-way model and rather, PR tasks had focused on one-way model for long period of time so that PR experience had negative effects on two-way PR objective research and formal research method. Second, restricted viewpoint of the organization on the PR is found to have negative effects on two-way PR objective research, formal research method and informal research method. Accordingly, it is required to make efforts to change the restricted viewpoint of the organization on the PR for professional research activities. Third, lack of time has static influence on one-way PR objective research and informal research method. Accordingly, PR practitioners should have sufficient time for research for execution of two-way PR objective research rather than one-way PR objective research as well as utilization of various research methods. This study results show which efforts PR practitioners and organization should make for activation of professional research in PR in the future.