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

Part III

Quantitative Methods for Effective Public Relations Research, Measurement, and Evaluation

Part III introduces the reader to the gathering of information from a quantitative approach. Quantitative methods differ from qualitative in three major ways. First, quantitative approaches are far less concerned with unique and individual responses; instead, they focus on the gathering of data from larger groups of individuals. Second, many use quantitative methods to generalize to a larger group of individuals through sampling. And, third, to understand quantitative methods, the researcher must have an understanding of basic statistical procedures and analyses. In reality, as will be pointed out later, both qualitative and quantitative methods ...