Situational theory and the publics of a communication campaign on earthquake preparedness: A discriminant analysis

Grunig's situational theory presents four types of the publics--the problem-facing public, the constrained, the routine, and the fatalistic--in terms of their perceptions of a certain situation and the external constraints. This study attempted to profile these four publics in terms of their active and passive communication behaviors, level of involvement, demographic attributes, and consequent communication effects. The study used the situation of an earthquake prediction and a relevant communication campaign in Southeast Missouri in 1990.; A stepwise discriminant analysis was employed to discover useful variables in identifying differences among the four publics. The data in this study were obtained from a larger public opinion study using a telephone survey of random-selected respondents in three Southeast Missouri communities and the nearby area. The data were collected in November, 1990.; The results of the discriminant analysis profiled the four publics. The problem facers are most likely to display active information seeking and to be highly involved with the earthquake issue. Moreover, they tend to show greatest support for earthquake preparedness. The fatals, in contrast, tend to display lowest involvement, least support and least active information seeking than do those problem-facers. The other two publics, the constrained and the routine, were most discriminated by perceived communication effects and level of education. The routine public tends to consist of high-educated people who perceive themselves as knowledgeable about and well prepared for the earthquake issue. On the contrary, the constrained public tends to be comprised of low-educated people who do not think themselves as knowledgeable and well prepared.; This study found support for situational theory in a highly crisis situation such as the threat of a major earthquake. Consistent with previous studies using situational theory, this study found that passive information processing failed to discriminate among the publics, and that active information seeking successfully differentiated the active problem-facers from the passive fatals.; In contrast to prior studies treating involvement as a situational variable to predict active communication behavior, this study examined the power of involvement in discriminating among the four publics. Results showed that involvement consistently separated the high-problem-recognition public from the low-problem-recognition one, implying some relationships between involvement and problem recognition that prior studies failed to explore. The study suggests enhancing situational theory by examining the interaction effects of the three situational variables--problem recognition, constraint recognition, and involvement--in predicting the publics' communication behaviors and communication responses.