Journal Resume: An Open-System Approach to Building Theory in Public Relations

Journal Resume: An Open-System

Approach to Building Theory in Public Relations

Aazarah Ayu Anggraini

135120207121007

Communication Science

Faculty of Social and Political Science

Brawijaya University

      Broom (2006) argued that theory construction in public relations requires both scientific methods and openness to conceptual and methodological input from the larger fields of communication and human behavior. Public relation in that time is not well developed, the author is in the stage that he has an obligation to conduct a research and publish his finding to ensure their integrity by paying more attention to the questions they ask, to the methods they employ, to the decisions they make about what gets published, and to the openness of their search for concepts and theoretical frameworks. Building theory is necessary to do for advancing both practice and our understanding of how it function on public relation. The approach of this building theory that author use is open system approach, the author has to reach beyond their limitation literature and paradigm and requires transparency about how our research is conducted, how the data are analyzed, and how the findings are linked to theory and practice. The author methodological in building theory in Public Relation are choosing focal concept, defining focal concept, validating the concept, explicating the concept, and last building theory in the open-system model.

       Focal concept is a concept that researcher selected derived from the practice and viewed by practitioners as important (Chaffe 1991 pp. 14-15 cited in Broom, 2006), this process seen most effectively. In defining focal concept, the author recasts the concept of analyzing process:

1.      Select a concept of interest. The author interest in public relation comes from his frustration of what he found to be inadequate ways to describe what practitioners do. He decided to explore what he perceived to be overlapping experiences and interests.

2.      Determine purpose, the purpose have to be answer the purpose of the inquiry.

3.      Identify how the concept has been defined and used, because using open system approach, don’t limit the searching of definition or use of the concept. Find as many as sources on how concept and related concept have been defined and used.

4.      Determine defining attributes. Review all of the definitions and uses that have been found in the literature then make a differentiation criteria the concept from others.

5.      Create a model cases. Construct a prototype to make recognize what is and what is not the focal concept when observing situations that may or may not include instances of the concept

6.      Create related, but different, cases. Construct examples of borderline, related, and contrary cases to help clarify or proved of what is not the concept.

7.      Develop the measure, this step indicates the presence of focal concept, see how others related to concepts.

8.      Build theory around the focal concept, find the causes of variance in the focal concept and the effects of variance in the vocal concept.

Concepts are the building blocks of theory, the quality of theory building in public relation depends on the concepts used in construction. The open-system approach tends to increase from those in the practice who often are critical of the work and be essential participants in completing the research.

   In roles research, the research plan called for administering the roles as experimental treatments in a controlled environment. The stated purpose of the research
was to learn if the concept would be helpful in accomplishing the major strategic
planning project for a real public relations.

   The next step was to continue the concept explication process by
operationalizing the roles as questionnaire items to measure the degree to which
each was being enacted in practice. Rather, using the defining attributes
identified in the concept analysis, one must carefully craft and refine questionnaire items that capture the true qualities of the concept (validity) in consistent
and precise ways (reliability) (Broom, 2006). In order to explicating the concept, it need to do a depth interview to defining the operational definitions, and hypothesis. 

   The key of success research is the validity and reliability of the data but there are many have turned to methods that don’t require data. Building theory requires the objective, systematic, and controlled gathering of data to test hypothesis. The main purpose in building public relation theory is using open-system approach but it’s turning to closed-system approach.

Bibliography

Broom, G. M. (2006). An Open-System Approach to Buliding Theory in Public Relation. Journal of Public Relations Research, 18 (2), 141-150.