Research Results

Research in public relations serves many functions.  In addition to aiding in choosing the best path for a campaign to proceed, eliminating inefficient moves, research can also be helpful to a public relations firm in advocating or disseminating certain features of products, services and ideas.  Reports then stress the findings and resulting recommendations of the research because the public generally is interested in the conclusions rather than the detailed means of how those conclusions were found.

In this way, I think research results and their publication is a topic closely associated with my blog from last week on research ethics.  A lot of weight is put on the integrity of the researchers and public relations firm to publish what they found wholly, truthfully and without bias.  Research results should never be fixed or changed from the actual findings to sway the public in a certain way.   

An example where this is not the case is described in this article, "Fattened Statistics," from the Social Issues Research Center (SIRC).  The SIRC, according to their website, is an independent, non-profit organization that conducts research of their own on social topics while also monitoring social and cultural trends.  In "Fattened Statistics," SIRC exposed flawed percentages used by the media to denote the number of obese children in Britain.  Obesity, a battle nutritionists across the globe are still fighting, existed, according to this article, in Britain in 2006.  The problem this article exposes however, shows that the obesity issue was not as large then as it was made out to be.  The published numbers were based on outdated UK National Body Mass Index (BMI) standards for defining obesity in children.  The Guardian, a British national daily newspaper, was one of the media outlets who bit at the bait and published the percentages.  However, they had legitimately gotten the information from data published by The Health Survey for England and from the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre.  The article then stated that the National BMI standards used in the reports by the Health Survey for England exaggerated obesity in boys by approximately 200 percent and in girls by approximately 100 percent. 

In this case, the information did get into the main media stream.  Because the percentages were inflated, the situation had the potential of causing the public unneccessary worry.  Not only does the reputation of a company depend on their truthful dealings with the public, but also, their reports should be as factually correct as possible in order for a tailored solution to have a good chance at fixing or dealing with the reports.