Study shows public relations professionals rank seventh among twenty professions

By Tara Haelle

Renita Coleman

Public relations professionals have joined the ranks of medical professionals and journalists as sound ethical thinkers, according to a study coauthored by UT journalism professor Renita Coleman. The study, which appeared in the July 2009 “Journal of Public Relations Research,” said this is “good news for a profession that is often characterized as engaging in unethical practices.”

“The Moral Development of Public Relations Practitioners: A Comparison with Other Professions and Influences on Higher Quality Ethical Reasoning” is the first research project to empirically measure the moral development of working public relations professionals. Coleman coauthored the study with University of Missouri-Columbia journalism professor Lee Wilkins, with whom she published a similar study looking at journalists’ ethical reasoning in 2005.

“We just wanted to know where public relations professionals would score compared to journalists and other professionals who have taken it,” Coleman said. “We didn’t make any predictions as to where they would [fall].”

Results show that public relations professionals rank seventh among the 20 professions that have been tested, just below dental students and nurses. The study utilized the Defining Issues Test (DIT), which has also been used to test the ethical reasoning of doctors, business professionals, philosophers, college students and prison inmates.

The test presents six ethical dilemmas for which the subject must determine how important 12 different considerations are in making a decision. Though worded to be specific to each scenario, the statements that test-takers  rank address such questions as, “What would most benefit society?” and “Will the community’s laws be upheld?” The ranking method ensures the subject’s ethical reasoning is being tested instead of the particular course of action they would take in a scenario.

“We have an ethical muscle, and learning how to use it better makes us stronger ethical thinkers,” Coleman said. One goal of the research is to find out which factors correlate highly with moral development in the public relations field, she said. If the researchers could identify factors that might improve professionals’ ethical reasoning, then that information can be presented in training seminars and industry publications.

Two of the scenarios in the testing instrument are specific to a job in public relations. One deals with confirming or denying leaked information about a school closing, and the other concerns whether to inform hired experts about the potential abuse of an herbal medicine. The other four original scenarios involve “whether a high school principal should censor a student newspaper; whether a neighbor should turn in an escaped prisoner who has led a model life; whether a doctor should help a patient commit suicide; and whether a man should steal a drug to save his dying wife,” according to the study.

The results, from 118 professionals randomly selected from the 400 largest public relations firms in the U.S., showed that subjects scored better on the dilemmas specific to public relations issues, which Coleman attributed to the professional expertise they develop working in their field.

“They have a lot of practice solving those dilemmas and a lot more in-depth knowledge of all the nuances and the ramifications,” said Coleman, who pointed out that journalists scored better on journalism-related scenarios in her previous study. “I would expect a medical doctor to understand issues of privacy of medical information more than a journalist, and I would expect a journalist to understand issues of truth telling more than harm. Those are the values our profession deals with and upholds.”

Among all the professions that have been tested with the DIT over the past three decades by various researchers, seminarians and philosophers are the runaway top scorers, followed by medical students and practicing physicians. Journalists, determined from Coleman and Wilkins’ previous research, ranked fourth. The prison inmates group scored second lowest, just above junior high students.

The test looks at six categories of influences on ethical reasoning: business concerns, internal motives, truth and respect issues, religious influences and external influences, such as company standards or codes of ethics. Business concerns include factors related to profits and what is good for the company. Although these concerns did not appear to be a significant factor in the study, the results are based on self-reporting, which Coleman does not think is realistic for testing how money matters might more subtly affect people’s reasoning in ethical decisions.

“I think economic pressures cause you to do things that are less ethical than if you didn’t have those pressures,” she said. “But I don’t believe the methodology we have is best for uncovering that. I don’t know what methodology to use to uncover that.”

This is one of several areas where Coleman hopes to do more research, possibly by looking next at entrepreneurs in journalism. She said she is aware of another as-yet unpublished study that used the DIT with advertisers. Although they scored well in the five general scenarios, she said they scored very poorly on the advertising-related dilemmas.

“That’s part of why I believe there’s an economic pressure that’s important,” she said. The advertisers ranked issues related to pleasing the client as most important in the advertising dilemmas. “They would do the wrong thing in order to benefit the client. I think we should tease out the economic pressures angle in all these professions because if economic pressures cause us to make poor ethical decisions, we need to know that so we can minimize the effects of economic pressures.”

Coleman and Wilkins’ study also looked at factors that included political party and ideology, religious beliefs, job autonomy, organization size, taking an ethics course, attending professional seminars, the importance of ethics codes, belonging to professional organizations, length of time working in the field, degree of market competition, age, education and gender. Although most of these did not show up as significant, a few patterns emerged that remained consistent with findings in other DIT research studies. For one, people who self-identify as more politically conservative or more fundamentalist in their religion score lower.

Coleman said the low scores associated with fundamentalist religious beliefs, regardless of the actual creed, has to do with the extent to which fundamentalist beliefs discourage questioning authority.

“If you don’t question rules and what other people say are ethical norms, you can’t score very high on this test,” she said. “Thinking for yourself and analyzing things is just too critical to making good moral choices. If you’re just going to say, ‘My boss says so,’ or ‘My moral code of ethics says so,’ and you’re not going to look at the individual situation in its own context, then you’re not going to score well.”

These findings showed up in her previous study on journalists as well, leading to negative feedback from politically conservative and fundamentalist religious groups. In this study, however, the primary criticism she has received relates to the study’s funding source. Their research used a $10,000 grant from Penn State University’s Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication, a research center dedicated to the study and advancement of ethics and responsibility in corporate communication and other forms of public communication.

“The skeptics think we’re finding what they wanted us to find, but they funded it and paid for it before the results were done,” she said. The project took a year to collect the data as the researchers flew around the country to administer the test in person at various public relations firms and then another year to analyze the data, write the report and go through the peer-review process for publication. “We certainly would not color our results to make the sponsor happy. For one thing, we teach ethics!”

Coleman said she has always been intrigued by ethical issues, even throughout her 15 fifteen years in newsrooms.

“I’m wired for fair, and I tended to see ethical issues in everything,” she said. “I could see myself studying it in such a way that I could help the profession be better at what we do.” As an instructor of a visual journalism course, she has also researched the effect images have on ethical reasoning and discovered that they improve ethical reasoning by helping the person feel empathy.

“When you feel empathetic in the dilemma, when you’re in their shoes, that improves your ethical reasoning,” she said. She hopes her future research will elucidate more ways people can remove the obstacles to better ethical decision-making. “We need to know what the real problems are so we can overcome them,” she said.