AWARENESS, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICES TOWARDS COVID-19 AMONG IIUM STUDENTS

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than two million people within a year. The deadly virus brings chaotic problems to every layer of society, including university students. The main goal of this study is to investigate the awareness regarding COVID-19 among International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM) students. This study examines the awareness, perception, and involvement of the IIUM community to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during the scare. A qualitative research design was employed, using an interview method through purposive sampling procedure as the research instrument used for the data collection. A total of eight respondents, including international and local university students, participated in the study. The study adopted the situational theory of publics by Grunig (1966) to guide the study. This study found that IIUM local students have adequate information and awareness regarding COVID-19. However, future efforts should be aimed at enhancing awareness campaigns among the IIUM international students in Malaysia. The findings of the study will have implications on awareness, perception, and behaviour during a virus outbreak.

Publics Segmentation by the Issuance of Disaster-related Crisis Alert

Recently, a new infectious disease, COVID-19, has been spreading not only in Korea but around the world. As a result, the Korean government raised the level of infectious disease crisis alerts to a serious level on February 23, 2020. The purpose of this study is to apply the situational theory of publics to publics segmentation according to the issuance of a crisis alert and to suggest ways to improve the crisis alert system. To this end, the level of public perception on crisis alerts was checked. The verification confirmed that the situational theory of publics is a suitable theoretical framework for analyzing the communication behaviors of the public toward crisis alerts. As a result of the public segmentation, 42.7% were classified as active publics. Based on this, it was suggested to reorganize the crisis alert system as a system for communicating with the public.

When Relationships Meet Situations: Exploring the Antecedents of Employee Communication Behaviors on Social Media

Grounded in the relationship management theory and the situational theory of publics, this study examines the effects of employees’ perceived relationships with their organization on their situational perceptions and how these perceptions influence their communication behaviors on social media. An integrated model of situational organization–employee relationship is proposed and tested. The study was based on a national survey of 449 employees working at large organizations in the United States. Organization–employee relationships were found to facilitate employees’ problem recognition and level of involvement and to weaken their constraint recognition. Employees with low constraint recognition and high levels of involvement were more likely to seek, process, and share information on social media, whereas those with high problem recognition tended only to process information. This study is one of the first to integrate the relational perspective with the situational perspective. It also offers practical suggestions for large organizations on how to build and maintain quality relationships with employees and improve their communication behaviors on social media.

Looking back and going forward: The concept of the public in public relations theory

This article examines the development of the public as a foundational concept in public relations theory. It provides an overview of the way in which public relations has understood the term as referring to two distinct phenomena of a public and the public. The article approaches public relations theory as unfolding of a narrative identity of public relations. The discussion subsequently reaches to the work of Michael Warner and Judith Butler to consider the limitations and implications of the situational theory of publics and the deliberativist approach to the public derived from the work of John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas. In its final sections, the article redefines the public as a family of three distinct, but at times, overlapping terms: an audience as a public of shared spaces, a self-organized public of shared attention, and the public as a political and social imaginary. This article argues for the need to adopt the performative approach to the public in order to tackle some of the biases in public relations theory. It also suggest the PESO model of communication a useful starting point to create a more complex understanding of the formation of the public (in all three senses) in relation to processes of co-creation and circulation of a wide range of texts.

Strategic Communication in Public Participation

This paper emphasises significantly on public relations strategic planning in public participation to gain organisational effectiveness. Grunig (1992) describes organisation’s decision affects public and in turn the public affect the organisation’s decision. This paper discusses the Situational theory of publics (Grunig, 1992) and highlights communication programmes for public participation in the development of slope area in Bukit Antarabangsa, Selangor. This paper suggests a framework of public relations strategic planning for public participation in MPAJ based on findings obtained from multiple methods of data collection. Keywords: public relations, strategic planning, communication, public participation. eISSN 2514-7528 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI:https://doi.org/10.21834/jabs.v3i10.315

Publics Approaches to Health and Risk Message Design and Processing

The concept of publics and related notions such as receivers, audiences, stakeholders, mass, markets, target groups, and the public sphere are central to any discussion of formal communication programs between organizations or other strategic communicators and the individuals or groups with which they strive to communicate. The concept explains why individuals and collectivities of individuals are motivated to communicate for themselves (to seek or otherwise acquire information), with similar individuals to form organized groups, and with formal organizations to make demands on those organizations or to shape the behavior of the organizations. Theories of publics originated in the 1920s as the result of debates over the nature of citizen participation in a democracy, the role of the mass media in forming public opinion, the role of public relations practitioners in the process, and the effects of communicated messages on publics, audiences, and other components of society. J. Grunig developed a situational theory of publics in the 1960s that has served as the most prominent theory of publics for 50 years, and J.-N. Kim and J. Grunig recently have expanded that theory into a situational theory of problem solving. These theories have been used to identify and segment types of publics, to explain the communication behaviors of those publics, to conceptualize the effects of formal communication programs, to understand the cognitive processes of members of publics, and to explain the development of activist groups. Other scholars have suggested additions to these theories or alternatives to more thoroughly explain how communication takes place between members of publics and to identify latent publics that are largely ignored in the situational theories.