Generalizing from PRSA to public relations: How to accommodate sampling bias in public relations scholarship

One of the major challenges to conducting externally valid, quantitative scholarship in public relations is accessing samples of practitioners that are willing to participate in academic research. One sampling frame would naturally be the membership of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), which is the world's largest professional association for public relations practitioners. Yet, even if the question of access were resolved, there still remains the question of external validity, i.e., the issue of whether and to what extent the membership of PRSA (or any other sampling frame) reflects the population of public relations practitioners in general. The purpose of this study was thus to examine the population of U.S. public relations practitioners and compare it to the PRSA membership, using census data from PRSA and sample data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. Results of this study are significant for public relations scholarship because they address the fundamental question of external validity, without which no research can claim to offer a true contribution to the body of knowledge in public relations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.