Qualitative Research Methods in Public Relations and Marketing Communications

Christine Daymon, Immy Holloway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136935022
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

The second edition of this highly accessible, core textbook continues to offer students a practical guide to the process of planning, undertaking and writing about qualitative research in public relations and marketing communications. Through clear explanations and illustrations, the book encourages undergraduate and master level students to engage with the main approaches and techniques for conducting critical, reflective investigations.

This new edition:

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• Identifies the skills and strategies needed to conduct authentic, trustworthy research

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• Highlights specific analytical techniques associated within the main research approaches

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• Provides new sections on internet-based research, critical discourse analysis, historical research, action research and mixed methods research

Qualitative Research Methods in Public Relations and Marketing Communications will be invaluable for those undertaking research methods courses on public relations and marketing communication degrees, as well as those working on a dissertation.

Part I
Getting started

1
The nature and usefulness of qualitative research for public relations and marketing communications

This chapter addresses the distinctiveness of qualitative research and the benefits it holds for exploring contemporary and historical issues in public relations and marketing communications. The chapter covers:

• ways of thinking about research, including how the researcher’s worldview determines the type of knowledge that is generated;

• the characteristics of qualitative research and how these compare with those of quantitative research;

• the value and complementarity of both qualitative and quantitative types of thinking;

• suggested topics for studies involving qualitative research.

Introduction

There are two core ways of doing research in public relations and marketing communications, namely qualitative and quantitative. Our interest in this book is in qualitative research, used on its own or in a role that complements quantitative research. Both types of research have distinct characteristics, making each valuable for uncovering a certain, different view of managed communication while obscuring another view. Therefore, both qualitative and quantitative research are needed if we are to properly understand public relations and marketing communications as distinct phenomena and disciplines, and their role in society.

Every research project is guided by what a researcher wants to achieve, what they believe is good research and what it means to conduct research into strategic communication. Each researcher, therefore, has particular priorities and orientations which direct the research project. To some extent, it is relatively easy to choose which set of qualitative or quantitative methods will provide the most effective investigatory tool. Where the challenge lies is in tackling the thinking that drives the research question in the first place. This is because how we structure our ideas concerning what we query determines, first, what we find to be relevant or what we discard and, more importantly, the answers we get (as well as those we overlook). Therefore, the type of knowledge we gain from doing research gives us a certain grasp on public relations and marketing communications and their consequences. It also shapes how we experience them.

Helpful hint

The research question influences your research methodology. Make sure you have a sound fit between the two. Qualitative research offers a powerful means to better understand communication relationships and the social world but not all research questions call for a qualitative approach.

Public relations and marketing communications are concerned with intentional, often persuasive, communication whereby communicators and stakeholders (and often the media) are relationally active in creating, amending and re-constructing meanings and, thus, in transforming their social worlds. What this means is that, as individuals and groups of people, we perpetuate or change our opinions about the world in which we live and work through relational communication in our daily lives. Managed or strategic communication plays a role as an ‘unseen power’ (Heath, 2009: 2) seeking to shape how and what we know at the individual and societal levels, and also how we define our own identities in relation to others. Social reality or culture, then, does not necessarily stem from an open dialogue between two equal parties who collaboratively reach a common understanding, but instead may spring from the ‘struggle of actors in a public battlefield of meanings’ (Ihlen and van Ruler, 2009: 10), with that battle won by the party which is most powerful in defining reality. It is through this process that private and public attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and opinions – or social and cultural realities – are constructed and enacted on a daily basis in groups, organizations and societies.

Ideally, research should help us understand something of this complex, contextualized and emergent process. It should give us insights into how managed communication influences the dynamic process through which we create our realities and cultures. It also should give us a sense of how public relations and marketing communications themselves are shaped by the cultures in which they are embedded.

However, the adequacy of the answers we get from our research is always reliant on how willing we are as researchers to peer into the unknown. This means we have to look at things in often unconventional ways or from different vantage points. When a range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives are employed by researchers working within an academic discipline, then new knowledge is generated, and the discipline is able to progress in its development. If you are a research student, then you have a role to play in this process of developing knowledge not only for yourself but also for future practitioners, academics and students of public relations and marketing communications.

Different ways of thinking about research in a postmodern world

As in much management-related research, investigators of strategic and managed communication have tended on the whole to follow a linear way of understanding the world. Research from this vantage point is grounded in thinking known as positivism, and usually employs quantitative methods to gather numerical data. To date, most research in marketing communications is quantitative. A content analysis by West (2007) of articles published over 15 years in the International Journal of Advertising shows that qualitative studies are in the minority. In public relations, the emerging results from our ongoing content analysis of articles in five international public relations journals suggests the same thing.

The aim of quantitative research grounded in positivism is to explain phenomena based on what is already known about public relations and marketing communications. While this is relevant if you want to examine questions about cause and effect, or to measure and evaluate something, the linear focus and assumptions of stability associated with positivist research make it less suited to investigating the complexity and transformability of contemporary communication relationships.

The marketing scholar Gummesson refers to the ‘excessive use of quantitative methods’ (2007: 130), which he suggests precludes the openness, tolerance and critique which enable and motivate unconventional, creative thinking. It is especially incompatible with the increasingly interconnected, complex and volatile nature of the postmodern world, where, for example, the growth of digitalized media and subsequent democratization of access to and ownership of information have led to the erosion of the control structures of modern institutions, ranging from governments to corporations (e.g. Scase, 2007). This has consequences for strategic communications which historically have aligned themselves with the control and rationalization of inbound and outbound communication. How appropriate are such practices in an era where contemporary organizations are highly transparent, and today’s citizens demand justice, integrity and socially responsible actions from those they interact with? Furthermore, to a generation of young consumers saturated with consumption imagery and emotionally charged symbols, how realistic is it to assume that there will be an homogeneity of meaning within stakeholder groups regarding the notions of integrity, ethics and responsibility? The implications for public relations and marketing communications practices in such a diverse, risky and uncertain environment are unlikely to be comprehended through traditional research approaches.

To study complexity, power relations and the co-construction of meaning in a holistic or critical sense requires a different, more flexible type of research where the process of discovery is blended with intuition (although this is not without rigour and order as well). It is in this type of research that qualitative methods can perhaps best reach their potential. This is because there is a more natural fit between qualitative research, with its ability to delve into meaning, and the critical or interpretive ways of thinking which are concerned with the social construction of reality. We discuss different types of research thinking in Chapter 6 but for now it is sufficient to think of interpretive or critical research as being shaped by distinct worldviews.

Critical researchers are interested in stimulating emancipation and social change by, for example, challenging orthodox practices and ways of thinking, or uncovering what has been marginalized. Their methodologies are usually grounded in interpretive thinking. Interpretive researchers are concerned primarily with reaching understanding about how meaning is constructed and re-constructed through communication relationships which they study in their ‘natural’ or ‘local’ setting. From such a vantage point, you are likely to be concerned with questions related to communication processes occurring in natural settings, such as how meaning is co-created through communication in interpersonal or organizational-stakeholder relationships; or how the impressions and understandings held by a community are informed by and have consequences for broader social and historical locations; or why the discourses of certain groups have become prevalent in certain situations and not others; and also the big questions that challenge conventional disciplinary thinking.

When researching managed communication related to organizations, people or societies, interpretive investigators endeavour to do so from the perspective of those they are studying, rather than imposing researchers’ terms and concepts on the research. They want to know what the implications are of this knowledge for professional and academic practice and knowledge, and more broadly for the role of public relations and marketing communications in society. Their interest is in the voices and perspectives of stakeholders and practitioners engaged in communication at different levels, including the interpersonal, organizational, professional and societal. Researchers with this agenda, then, employ qualitative methods to examine communication as experienced by people not as something linear and logical but as typically open, complex and human. They also see communication and social relations as inseparable from their social and historical contexts.

Key point

Communication relationships are inseparable from the social and historical contexts in which they occur, and this is reflected in the contextualized nature of qualitative research.

The different orientations that guide research each have their own strengths and weaknesses and therefore are sometimes most effective when employed within multi-dimensional or mixed methods research, as we point out in Chapter 20. However, it is not always possible or appropriate to combine methodologies in this way and the challenge is knowing when it is best to design research ...