Research is an important part of any public relations effort. It supplies the initial inputs to guide strategy and message development and provides a method for predicting effectiveness and assessing results. Public relations professionals must be able to measure the effects of their work and make reasonable predictions about future success if they wish to influence managerial decisions in most organizations today.

Many public opinion surveys are not useful in public relations planning and evaluation because they tend to average responses so that the relative strengths of attitudes are disguised. Good public opinion research must be sensitive enough to segment publics according to the strengths of their opinions. Four basic categories of research in public relations are sufficiently sensitive: environmental monitoring, public relations audits, communication audits, and social audits.

To learn more about public relations research watch the interview with Dr. Rick Fischer, Clip #15, on the book's CD-ROM