ABSTRACT
As Botan and Taylor (2004: 645) state, public relations is both a professional practice and an academic field. In both communities research is done but this is not necessarily the same kind of research. A recent dissertation on the use of research in public relations practice in Ireland (McCoy, 2006) confirmed what has been known from many other studies in other countries as well: a common measurement tool for doing research in public relations practice is the “eyes and ears” method-talking to an unsystematic selection of members of the public or the media, reading some reports and drawing conclusions on the basis of these reports, or listening to solicited or unsolicited feedback from superiors or members of a public without systematically planning the research or analyzing the results. This is what Pavlik (1987: 91) called “seat-of-thepants” research; Broom and Dozier (1990) have called it “informal research” and Rühl (in this book) terms it “laymen’s research.” The use of these kinds of laymen’s research might be due to the immaturity of the profession and its rapid growth, but it is detrimental to its prestige and its status, in practice as well as in the scholarly community.
