Public Relations Research

Research, is something I think most of us use it everyday. When you want to buy a bag, you research on where can you find the cheapest, or nicest one. When you want to write an essay, you research on academic articles to help you form an idea of what you want to write.
PR practioners do their research also. Without research, their campaign may be targetted at the wrong audiences, or worst, send out a wrong message which could result in adverse effects. Therefore research is very important for a PR practioner.

Research can take in many forms. Surveys, questionaires, focus groups etc. But they can be categorized into Quantitative and Qualitative analysis/research.
Quantitative usually comes in forms of surveys and questionaires and are often close ended questions. It is useful if infomation needs to come in large numbers as surveys are easier for people to fill up. Disadvantages is that you cannot get any more information outside the questions you ask.
Qualitative comes in forms like focus groups. You can get much more information from the participants as compared to surveys. But the disadvantage is that there is only that limited amount of people taking part each time and it is very time consuming.

Therefore PR practioners will need to choose the kind of analysis/research they want to do to suit what they want to find out, to make the best decisions for their clients for their campaign.