A Professional and Practitioner's Guide to Public Relations Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, Second Edition

Chapter 2

The Move Toward Standardization

This chapter is a summary of three Top 5 peer-reviewed articles published by us with Dr. Donald K. Wright of Boston University and Dr. Shannon A. Bowen of the University of South Carolina (Michaelson and Stacks 2011; Michaelson, Wright, and Stacks 2012; Bowen and Stacks 2013b). Each article addresses a similar theme—the movement from business as usual to best practices to the standards of how we do research that is essential to the modern public relations or corporate communication function. In this move from merely counting what is sent to audiences (outputs) to examining the effects on intermediary and target audiences, we focus on outcomes that are typically described as soft rather than the hard ...