The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication: A Guide to Internal Communication, Public Relations, Marketing, and Leadership

What You Need to Know about Public Relations Research

There are three forms of research in public relations: primary research, which centers on conducting original research; secondary research, which is based on the mining of preexisting data and information; and statistical modeling, which seeks to create some greater learning through the unified statistical analysis of disparate sources of data, both primary and secondary.

Primary research usually involves a process of questioning respondents for the benefit of their observations and opinions to help the researching organization achieve greater insight. The type of primary research that yields objective, statistically reliable results is known as quantitative research. When quantitative research ...