Communication Planning

Public Affairs Qualification Course

Communication Planning-Research

Communication Planning-Research

Research is the key to any successful public relations, communications and/or marketing efforts. Without research, those who administer public relations, public affairs, promotional, and related communications programs and activities for their organizations would be operating in the dark, without any guidance or clear sense of direction.

This class is designed to give you the tools necessary for maintaining your organization’s credibility with its various publics using a detailed communication plan, supported by appropriate research.

Home | Introduction and Role | Public Opinion | Research Methods | Tools | SWOT

The Defense Information School, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland 1

Public Affairs Qualification Course Communication Planning-Research

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Introduction and Role

Introduction

Research is the systematic gathering of information to describe and understand situations and to check out assumptions about publics and public relations consequences. Research can also be defined as a systematic investigative approach concerned with a problem or intending to prove or disprove an hypothesis. Its main purpose is to reduce uncertainty in decision making. Research is only as good as its application to the problem-solving process.

● challenges or validates assumptions & accepted practices

● provides basis for informed decisions

● adds to professional knowledge base and,

● can be personally rewarding

Research is no longer a right or investment in military understanding or military operations, but a commodity.

PAOs should be confident they are informed and have evidence to support the information they provide about a topic. (Commanders value those research skills that

PAOs use because the PAO is presenting information that is based on evidence).

An example of a decision grounded in research is the decision to change the don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

Before the new policy was implemented the services required service members to fill out surveys and the information was gathered and analyzed before the policy changed.

To be research-oriented means gathering information is a natural part of your daily routine. Continually gathering and analyzing information means your decisions will be research-based.

Example: Reading and reviewing articles from a daily news feed (such as Defense News, Foreign

Policy, Politico or Google News), reading the local newspapers, listening to local radio stations for information pertinent to the unit’s or command’s mission or areas of interest.

By researching a topic before implementing a plan, the research provides a purpose in carrying out the tactics and helps to put meaning to what is being carried out. Research is used to explain why something is occurring. Most often this means identifying and explaining in more detail and giving an overall explanation. By researching you are able to backup and justify your findings.

Role

The role of research is to help individuals discover information new to the organization by gathering and investigating for what others have done.

Research:

● provides answers to questions

● offers solutions to problems

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The Center of Excellence for Visual Information and Public Affairs


Public Opinion

Public opinion represents more than the collected views held by a particular category of individuals at one point in time. Public opinion reflects a dynamic process in which ideas are "expressed, adjusted, and compromised en route to collective determination of a course of action,” according to the reading in the Effective Public Relations textbook (p. 199).

Public opinion is found among publics, or groups of communicating people who have some common interest. Public opinion is not static. People's views about an issue can develop and change over time from disconnected, poorly informed reactions to more thoughtful and considered conclusions, from changeable public opinion to settled public judgment.

This process evolves through seven distinct stages, according to Daniel Yankelovich, author, public opinion analyst and co-founder of Public Agenda.

And unless one understands where people are in this process, survey results can frequently mislead.

Stage 1: Dawning Awareness

In this stage, people become aware of an issue, but do not yet feel a pressing need to take action.

For instance, surveys show that most Americans say child care is a serious problem when they are questioned about it, but it rarely surfaces when people are asked to name the most important issues facing the country. People acknowledge the problem, but there is little real urgency. Americans are aware of many problems, but only a few rise to the top of their list of priorities. Distinguishing between awareness and urgency is essential to interpreting public opinion correctly.

Stage 2: Greater Urgency

In Stage 2, people move beyond awareness to a sense of urgency. The dominant sentiment is often a panicky appeal to "do something!" Health care moved squarely into this second stage when the economic recession had many people terrified about losing their jobs.

Much of this anxiety was channeled into worry about insurance coverage. Although the health care issue had been kicking around for years, the public's concern rose sharply in economic bad times.

Stage 3: Reaching for Solutions

In the third stage, the public begins to look at alternatives for dealing with issues, converting freefloating concern into calls for action. Often, the public's attention focuses on choices that experts or policy-makers have crafted without being helped to understand the implications.

Since people do not fully understand the choices presented to them, stage three is a period of stunningly false endorsements, that is, the public expresses support for a proposal but backs down as soon as the costs and trade-offs are clarified. In the health care debate, for example, people favored broad expansion of health care coverage for children, low-income workers and others, but support wavered when people considered the likely costs.

Stage 4: Wishful Thinking

This is where the public's resistance to facing tradeoffs manifests most as people initially assume they can "have it all." On difficult issues — ones that require significant change or sacrifice — the public's wishful thinking must be overcome before people come to grips with more realistic solutions. With health care, people started with the assumption that complete health care was a right, and that insurance should pay for any treatment that will save lives, regardless of the cost.

Yet, the public balked at increased premiums and outof-pocket costs. The public showed resistance to facing realistic costs and trade-offs on the issue of health care.

Stage 5: Weighing The Choices

In this stage, the public does "choice work," weighing the pros and cons of the alternatives for dealing with an issue. Stage 5 is hard work, as people come to understand that easy, cost-free solutions are unlikely to work, and that seemingly simple solutions may have down-sides. When the public has given a lot of thought to an issue and proposals for addressing it, they begin to hold firmly to their opinions even when presented with unpleasant consequences.

One example currently being played out around the country concerns raising standards in public schools.

People are now more familiar with the debate, and their support for raising standards holds, even as they acknowledge that raising standards could result in




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Public Opinion (continued)

higher drop-out rates, and even when they consider the prospect of failing youngsters who have tried hard, but have not learned what is expected.

Stages 3, 4 and 5 can be grouped together under the general heading "working through" — a term which encompasses rational thought as well as feelings and ethical concerns.

The final two stages can be grouped together as the stages where the public comes to resolution about an issue.

Stage 6: Taking a stand intellectually.

In Stage 6 people accept an idea, but they usually do not act on it until they reach Stage 7.

The intellectual resolution of Stage 6 requires people to clarify fuzzy thinking, reconcile inconsistencies, consider relevant facts and new realities, and grasp the full consequences of choices.

Stage 7: Making a Responsible Judgment Morally and Emotionally

The two stages, stages 6 and 7, are linked, but different. People are quicker to accept change in their minds than in their hearts. In Stage 6 people accept an idea, but they usually do not act on it until they reach Stage 7. It can take decades for some issues to arrive at the last stage of public opinion, and the issue of women in the work place is one such example.

Over time the public has come to accept the idea of women working outside the home and strongly endorses ideas such as equal pay for equal work and non-discriminatory hiring. The only kernel of the issue that remains even somewhat controversial is whether mothers of young children should work outside the home. Even here, although many Americans express concern about how children fare in today's working families, very few blame women for working for selfish reasons, and most believe that it is entirely possible to be a good mother while in the labor force.

The emotional resolution of Stage 7 requires people to accommodate themselves to different situations, change their own thinking and behavior, and confront their own ambivalent feelings.

You can see how people's views about an issue can develop and change over time from disconnected, poorly informed reactions to more thoughtful and considered conclusions, from changeable public opinion to settled public judgment. In practice, both researchers and public relations practitioners take "snapshots" of public opinion, essentially freezing the process at one point in time so as to describe it and compare it with opinion at other times.

According to Navy PA Tactics Manual Para. 2b, p.

22, Public affairs directly impacts the core war fighting mission. It has the power to shape the battle space and affect operational outcomes. While it represents only one among many forms of communication available to operational commanders, it is a critical one because of its potential to directly affect public opinion. Public opinion influences the military’s ability to accomplish today’s mission and to prepare for tomorrow’s. A sound public affairs program built on credibility and trust can have a strong impact on public opinion, and thus on the success of the military.

So, to be effective in communicating with an organization's publics we must constantly listen and scan the environment for information. Public opinion matters and can influence military operations. The public perceives truth to be whatever public opinion says. Examples of how we listen and scan the environment include listening to a variety of radio stations, watching local television news, reading newspapers and blogs, checking your social media pages for stories and finding out what is being said about your command or a particular issue.

Now that we have discussed the role of research and public opinion let’s move on to four types of research methods: formal, informal, primary and secondary.




Research Methods

Formal methods

The purpose of formal research is to gather accurate and useful information. Formal methods help answer questions about situations that cannot be answered using informal approaches. Formal research is controlled, objective, and a systematic gathering of data. The researcher carefully defines the things under study and what will and won't be studied. It requires research team members to follow a systematic set of procedures to provide for the uniform collection of data and assessing the data.

The formal method provides a description based upon agreed upon units that can be measured and assessed for reliability, whereas the informal method describes the data based on the intuition of the researcher. The formal process helps ensure that researchers treat each participant in a study the same way and that they measure all participants’ responses in the same fashion. Scientific research results rely on a representative sample to the greatest extent possible and, to the greatest extent possible, researchers understand the limitations of samples that are not completely representative.

These approaches also make it possible to use inferential statistics, the process of using data from representative samples to estimate characteristics of populations.

Informal methods

The purpose of informal research methods is to detect and explore problem situations. They are less structured and more exploratory than formal methods. Informal methods are viewed as a good means for detecting and exploring problem situations and for pretesting research and program strategies.

Informal methods serve valuable purposes.

“Exploratory” best represents the probing nature of informal methods. They do not follow specific rules, per se. Informal methods can be useful, if practitioners recognize their weaknesses and purposes.

The major problem with informal methods, samples of unknown representatives, result from how samples are selected. The issue is the extent to which the results from samples represent anybody other than the few from whom information was gathered. For example, the results may represent only the opinions of a vocal minority rather than the majority.

Primary research

Primary research results from gathering the information firsthand for a specifically identified purpose. It is research you implement yourself or contract out for a particular purpose.

There are two broad categories of primary research: quantitative and qualitative

Quantitative. This type of research gathers statistical data for analysis, which relies on the scientific method to assist leaders in making decisions. This type of research deals with numbers. The approach starts with a random sample of data that is processed and manipulated into meaningful information, the heart of quantitative research. The quantitative approach answers the question "how many?"

Qualitative. This type of research is focused on individual cases or groups not necessarily statistically representative of a given population. Qualitative research incorporates judgmental or subjective factors into the research process. It is designed to obtain general themes and ideas from a target group.

Researchers talk to professionals and use this in their research. Opinions by experts such as lawyers, professors, doctors, counselors etc., individual experiences, and other subjective factors may be considered. Types of qualitative research include interviews, observations, as well as documents and audio visual materials used to record research observations and interviews.

Secondary research

Secondary research is primary research data originally collected by someone else for a different purpose that is now being drawn upon for a new use. Typically, it is cheaper and faster to use secondary research. You should exhaust secondary sources before embarking on any costly primary research efforts. Numerous governmental and commercial organizations conduct national, regional, and local surveys, some of which track issues and trends that you can use for your




Research Methods (continued)

research.

Additionally, special-interest publications and scholarly journals regularly publish research data, much of which is available on-line today. A commonly used research approach to information gathering in public relations is the use of online databases. Some of the most used include Lexis-Nexis, Dun and Bradstreet,

Dow Jones News/Retrieval.

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Tools

Now that we have looked at research methods, let’s move on to the tools available to assist you with your research.

The tools we will discuss are media content analysis, interviews, focus groups and surveys.

Media content analysis

Media content analysis is the application of systematic procedures for objectively determining what is being reported in the media. Media content analysis indicates what has been printed or broadcast, not what is read or heard. It can provide valuable insights into what is likely to be on the public agenda in the future. Media content analysis can also be used to help evaluate your program.

During the research step, it may be useful to perform a media content analysis to help better understand the problem and the media’s and public’s view of the problem. Media content analysis does not measure whether or not the audiences learned or believed message content. It does show that the information has been printed or broadcasted. During the research phase you will conduct a media content analysis of your topic. You must select a sample to be analyzed.

The sample selection must start from a certain start date to a certain end date.

See Appendix C and D in Communication Research

Dinfos booklet.

Now let’s move onto interviews.

Types of interviews

The types of interviews we will discuss are personal interviews, face-to-face and telephone interviews.

Personal interviews

Personal interviews are used for very sensitive issues and research that require deep probing for attitudes and behaviors. This is primary research.

The personal interview ensures greater control over the sample and the data, but not only is this method costly, it requires a lot of time and well-trained interviewers. In certain circumstances, it is the only viable method to secure reliable and useful information.

Face-to-face

In face-to-face interviews there is no significant time delay between question and answer; the interviewer and interviewee can directly react on what the other says or does. An advantage of this type of communication is that the answer of the interviewee is more spontaneous, without an extended reflection. But the interviewer must concentrate much more on the questions to be asked and the answers given.

Telephone interviews

There are numerous advantages to telephone interviews.

● Wide geographical access. People from all over the globe can be interviewed—provided they have access to a telephone.

● Hard to reach populations. It enables researchers to contact populations that might be difficult to work with on an face-to-face basis, such as mothers at home with small children, shift workers, computer addicts and people with disabilities may be potential audiences for telephone interviews.

● Closed site access. It is a possible means of access to people on sites, which have closed or limited access, such as hospitals, religious communities, prisons and the military.

● Sensitive accounts. Some personal issues are so sensitive that participants might be reluctant to discuss them face-to-face with an interviewer.

● Access to dangerous or politically sensitive sites.

With the telephone, interviewers can interview people living or working in war zones, or sites where diseases are rife, without needing to grapple with the danger— and the bureaucracy—of visiting the area.

Although the interviewer can interview people who are not easy to access, one of the disadvantages to telephone communication is the reduction of social cues. The interviewer does not see the interviewee,




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Tools (continued)

so body language etc., cannot be used as a source of extra information or questions. Some social cues, such as voice and intonation are still available.

Now that we have discussed types of media content analysis and interviews, let’s move on to focus groups.

A focus group involves approximately 8 to 12 people, who discuss a topic or issue in depth, led by a moderator. This represents primary research.

Practitioners use focus groups to explore how people will react to proposals and to gather information useful for developing questionnaires that will be used in more formal research methods. Government agencies have long used this exploratory strategy to solicit information and participation.

Because the group is small, selection is usually not truly random, and the group-discussion context introduces an artificial setting. Results are not representative of an entire public or the publics from which the participants were selected. Results of a focus group cannot be projected to a broader population. It is simply not appropriate to suggest that findings from this approach can be used in place of data gathered from scientifically selected samples.

So far we have discussed media content analysis, interviews and focus groups. Now let’s move onto surveys.

Surveys

Surveys are systematic queries of subsets of the population under study. Surveys are administered in many ways including by mail, in person, via telephone, and online. If you design the survey and conduct the analysis, this represents primary research. If you use a survey from another organization or from another effort, this is secondary research.

We will now examine mail, face-to-face, telephone and online surveys.

Mail surveys. The most traditional method of surveys is by mail. Advantages of mail surveys include, cost and time savings, convenience for respondents, greater assurance of anonymity, standardized wording, and no interviewer bias. The biggest disadvantage of mail surveys is the researchers have no control over who responds and low response rates are typical.

Face to face surveys. Face-to-face surveys give researchers a higher response rate, greater flexibility in dealing with respondents, affords a direct interaction between the researcher and other people, more control over conditions, and an opportunity to observe and record reactions not covered by the questionnaire.

The disadvantages include greater costs, greater inconvenience placed on respondents, less anonymity, and the degree to which respondents answer differently in the face of an interviewer.

Telephone surveys. Telephone surveys offer a faster and more cost-effective way to complete interview studies while providing somewhat greater anonymity to respondents. One major challenge for telephone surveys is sample selection. More than 95 percent of households have telephones, but not all are listed in directories. Computer-assisted random dialing has helped with this problem, however even with the most sophisticated software, sampling phone numbers still only produces about two working phone numbers for every three dialed.

Online surveys. Online surveys offer respondents greater convenience and offer the researcher greater efficiency. Some of the disadvantages to online surveys include a low response rate, and obtaining adequate sample frames or lists of email addresses from which researchers can select their samples.




SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses,

Opportunities and Threats)

So far we have discussed the role of research, public opinion, research methods and tools used in research. Now we will close out with a SWOT analysis used in research.

SWOT

Strength and threat strategies build on organizational strengths to counter threats in the external environment.

Weakness and opportunity strategies attempt to minimize organizational weaknesses to take advantage of external opportunities.

Researching the situation gives practitioners, their employers and clients the timely, complete, and accurate information they need to understand the problem, which serves as a basis for decision making.

Weakness and threat strategies attempt to minimize both organizational weaknesses and environmental threats.

Detailed analyses of the internal and external factors in the problem situation provide practitioners with the information they need to assess organizational strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) and to identify the opportunities (O) and threats (T) in the external environment.

In this course, we have adjusted those analytics slightly to better reflect the military organizational realities you will be facing. Commanders typically want to know how their staffs will leverage strengths and opportunities to mitigate weaknesses and threats facing their organizations. With that in mind, you will be asked to develop the following four SWOT strategies:

Strengths.

A strength is an INTERNAL resource or capacity that can be used effectively to achieve the project objective.

Strength/Weakness: How will you use communications to leverage an organizational strength to mitigate an organizational weakness?

Weakness.

A weakness is an INTERNAL limitation, fault or defect in the particular product, service or issue that may be the reason for developing a communication plan.

Strength/Threat: How will you use communications to leverage an organizational strength to counter or eliminate an external threat?

Opportunity/Weakness: How will you use communications to exploit an outside opportunity to mitigate an internal weakness?

Opportunity.

An opportunity is a favorable situation in your project or organization’s EXTERNAL environment, often a trend or a change of some kind or an overlooked need that increases the relevance or effectiveness of the project in question.

Opportunity/Threat: How will you use communications to leverage an outside opportunity to counter an external threat?

Threat.

A threat is a danger or menace in your project or organization’s EXTERNAL environment.

Often threats are ignored until they become major problems.

Typically the SWOT discussion is captured on a chart or table, such as below, with potential questions included.

Practitioners refer to this approach of situation analysis as SWOT analysis. Several strategic implications logically flow from this analytic framework. Traditionally, those pairings look like these:

Strengths

1. Advantages of issue, project, etc?

2. Unique capabilities?

3. Related experience, knowledge data?

4. Higher level support?

Strengths and opportunity strategies build on organizational strengths to take advantage of opportunities in the external environment.

Weaknesses

1. Disadvantages of issue, project, etc?

2. Gaps in capabilities?

3. Reputation on topic?

4. Deadlines and internal pressures?




SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses,

Opportunities and Threats) (continued)

Opportunities

1. New tech, service, ideas?

2. Potential partnerships?

3. Lifestyle trends?

4. Local, national, global influences?

To identify opportunities ask: What is out there now that we could possibly use, are there any new services that we could use, could we partner with a organization, is there a new capability that we can now use, etc.

Threats

1 New tech, services, ideas?

2. New company in town?

3. Obstacles faced that can be resolved externally and not within the organization?

4. Better capabilities from another organization?

Next to this breakout should be a listing of what additional information is needed. The more specific the SWOT entry, the better. You should avoid vague, general statements that could be offered with almost any organization under any situation. And remember, each of these elements must be supported with research.

To identify weaknesses, ask: “What could we do to improve this?”, “What do we do badly?”, or “What should we avoid?” Other areas of the organization may be able to resolve the problem caused by the weak point if, for instance, it is a financial, operational or marketing matter, in order to minimize its impact without you actually needing to communicate about it.

Threats can be identified by looking at the obstacles faced, initiatives by competitors or other organizations, changing technology and changing demand or technical requirements for what your command does or does not offer.

An example of SWOT analysis is located in the assignment files.

To identify strengths, ask: What processes do we have in place, what training is available, how do we currently solve the problem, what type of capabilities and sources do we currently have in place?

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Conclusion

Public Relations Research, as the name implies, focuses on the entire public relations process and examines the communications relationships that exist among and between institutions and their key target audience groups. This lesson was designed to give you the tools necessary for maintaining your organization’s credibility with its various publics using a detailed communication plan, supported by appropriate research.


Public Affairs Qualification Course

Communication Planning-Research

References and Additional Resources

Broom, G. (2009). Effective Public Relations, (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall

Wilson, L. & Ogden, J. (2004). Strategic Communications Planning for Effective Public Relations & Marketing,

(5th Ed.). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Joint Staff. (2010). JP 3-61: Public Affairs

Fearn-Banks, K. (2011). Crisis Communication A Casebook Approach(4th ed.) New York, NY: Routledge

Defense Information School, (2007) Communications Research

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Communication Planning

Public Affairs Qualification Course

Communication Planning-Research