The Moral Development of Public Relations Practitioners: A Comparison With Other Professions and Influences on Higher Quality Ethical Reasoning

Abstract

Abstract This study gathered baseline data on the moral development of 118 public relations professionals. The respondents scored 7th highest among all professionals tested. They performed significantly better when the ethical dilemmas were about public relations issues than when they were not, indicating domain expertise on ethical issues. No significant differences were found between men and women, or managers and nonmanagers. There were significant correlations between moral reasoning and several variables including political ideology and fundamental/liberal religious views. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was supported by a grant from the Arthur Page Legacy Scholars, Pennsylvania State University, 2005–2006. Notes 1Our demographics compare favorably to those of the random sample of 251 PRSA members in the Sallot et al. (Citation1998) survey, where 55% were women (60% in our study); 95% were Caucaisan versus 83% in our study. Sixty-two percent had bachelors degrees versus our 66%. Note. Principal axis factoring with Varimax rotation. 2The alpha level for the external influences index is below what we would like; however, alpha is largely a function of the number of items in an index. In this case, there are 3 items, which is relatively few. Generally, increasing the number of items increases alpha. Also, reliability can only depress relationships, implying that relationships we do find are stronger than they appear to be. Thus, alpha is a conservative estimate (Lord & Novick, Citation1968). Robinson, Shaver, and Wrightsman (1991), said reliabilities of .80 or higher are optimal but that reliabilities of between .60 and .69 are "moderate" and suggested that the cutoff should be below .60. We chose to retain the external influences index in the spirit of this exploratory research; this index did show a significant negative relationship to ethical reasoning. We chose to err on the side of caution, retaining a construct that, although numerically moderate, is of extremely high importance in practical, real-world terms. As such, it should be studied in more depth in future work.