Monday, October 25, 2010

Blog Post #8

This week we are to once again look at our classmates blogs and comment on what they have been writing and their opinions. I look forward to this assignment because I enjoy reading what my peers have been writing about, as their interests often differ from mine, and can give a new perspective on research and Public Relations, among various other topics.

The first blog I looked at was Charlie Niland's, which focuses on healthcare and medical public relations. Last week, Charlie wrote about how qualitative research is becoming more prominent in healthcare. After defining what qualitative research is, Charlie went on to describe how the use of qualitative research is controversial. He wrote, "Clinical experience, based on personal observation, reflection, and judgment, seems to be needed in order to translate scientific results into treatment of individual patients. Personal experience is often characterized as being anecdotal and a poor basis for making scientific decisions". With this statement, Charlie is saying that people often overlook personal experiences and believe them to be based on situational experiences only. However, he notes that observation of people in certain sitatuions can be very helpful when trying to assist someone who is in need in the medical field.

The second blog I read was Roberta Soares' blog, which is titled 'PR For the Fashionable'. Roberta's blog has a similar focus as mine but looks more broadly to all of the fashion industry, as opposed to mine which focuses mainly on research in fashion corporations. In her most recent entry, 'To Observe is to Dress... Or is it?', Roberta wrote about important observation is in correlation with success in the fashion industry. In her blog post, Roberta covered every angle, from how designers observe others, which influences their designs, to how consumers observe celebrities and media, which tells the majority of people how to dress. I never thought of unobtrustive research in this way before, and it really interested me. The fact that Roberta was focusing on unintentional observation was an aspect of unobtrusive research that isn't covered often, but is a huge part of everyone's daily lives. No matter how you want to phrase it, people spend much of their time observing each other and every thing around them. This was something Roberta touched on in her entry, but really made me think further.

To both PRR 332 sections and all of my peers, keep up the great work in your blogs- more than halfway done with the semester!! I look forward to reading more of your entries in the future!!

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