Journal of Public Relations Research

Yang, Sung-Un; Browning, Nicholas

2024 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2024.2304473

Coombs, W. Timothy; Tachkova, Elina R.

2024 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2023.2244615

Research and practice have noted the existence of what have been termed sticky crises. Sticky crises are extraordinary because they create uniquely challenging situations for crisis managers (Reber, Yarbrough, Nowak & Jin, 2020). This paper uses the emotion of moral outrage to conceptualize one form of sticky crisis we term moral outrage inducing crises and to outline a research program designed to develop theory and to enhance the practice related to this variant of sticky crises. The first section reviews the nature of sticky crises and what makes them complicated and difficult to manage. The next section discusses how people assess crisis situations arguing this is done based on cognitions and emotions. We then explore how moral outrage affects critical crisis assessments and provide a series of propositions designed to advance theory and practice for crisis communication in moral outrage inducing crises. We argue that an emotion-driven approach to crisis communication coupled with a concern for morals will promote a better understanding and management of moral outrage inducing crises and potentially other sticky crises that evoke moral outrage.

Gallicano, Tiffany D.; Wesslen, Ryan; Thill, Jean-Claude; Cheng, Zhuo; Shaikh, Samira

2024 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2023.2233105

People who suddenly take interest in a social movement because it is in the media spotlight are members of the hot issue public, whereas the enduring public has an ongoing interest in the issue after it fades from public discourse. This is the first study to compare the behaviors of each public through a social media analysis. We performed structural topic modeling on 151,004 tweets to investigate any differences in topics each type of public tweeted about. In addition, we analyzed whether each public’s generation of Twitter posts followed the power law with regard to the extent to which the workload of posting tweets was shared equally. Finally, we explored whether the hot issue public’s tweets subsided more quickly than the enduring public’s tweets. Theoretical and practical implications are addressed, including a discussion of hot issue publics on social media.

Yao, Hui-Chung; Ling, I-Ling; Liu, Chihyi; Liao, Jun-Fang

2024 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2023.2215989

This study investigates how disclosure type and disclosure time have impacts on organizational reputation when medical negligence occurs and whether the mechanism of concealment intention and offensiveness attribution serially mediates the relationship between stealing thunder and organizational reputation. The study also explores the moderating effects of an organizational/industrial history of crisis concealment. Based on three scenario-based experiments, the results demonstrate that, compared to a media disclosure, the self-disclosure effect elicits lower concealment intention and higher organizational reputation. The longer the disclosure time, the higher the concealment intention and the lower the organizational reputation. The findings also show that the effect of disclosure type on organizational reputation is mediated serially by concealment intention and offensiveness attribution. In addition, for hospitals with an organizational history of crisis concealment, the effect of stealing thunder on concealment intention and organizational reputation was weaker. Further, under an industrial history of crisis concealment, the public perceived lower concealment intention and higher organizational reputation when the media disclosed the current crisis case.

Zhang, Xing

2024 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2023.2236738

When a new crisis occurs, narratives surrounding past crises are often intensively created and shared on social media, which together form a kind of crisis memory in current crisis communication and these narratives are referred to as crisis memory narratives. This study examined the effects of the public’s exposure to various crisis memory narratives of SARS (i.e. nationalism, heroism, identity, trauma, criticism, and historical reference) on their cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to the current public health crisis of COVID-19 through an online experiment with a Chinese adult sample (n = 745). Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory, a parallel-serial mediation model was tested. The overall findings revealed that crisis memory narratives had limited direct effects on behavioral responses (i.e. supportive behavioral intentions); however, the effects on cognitive (i.e. perceived threats, efficacy, and government controllability) and affective responses (i.e. positive and negative emotions) were significant, and these responses greatly mediated between certain types of crisis memory narratives and supportive behavioral intentions.