Measurement in Public Relations

Abstract

Public relations can be measured and evaluated in many different ways, using a range of theoretical lenses. This chapter focuses on the emergence of measurement indices and scales that are specific to public relations scholarship. The roots of academic study in public relations are inextricably tied to practice. Until the end of the 1980s, scholarship in early public relations journals, such as the defunct Public Relations Quarterly and Public Relations Journal, focused almost exclusively on applied practical research. In the firmly established area of organizationally focused public relations research, satisfactory reliability and validity was reported in most applications of key concepts. The discipline of public relations has moved beyond its formative early years and awkward adolescent search for a singular identity. The lack of established measures as compared to other fields of communication scholarship is due to the relatively short time that public relations have existed as a discipline.