Elsevier

Public Relations Review

Volume 39, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 612-614
Public Relations Review

Research in brief
Analysing public relations education through international standards: The Portuguese case

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2013.07.020Get rights and content

Abstract

By using international reports on PR education as a benchmark we analyse the status of PR higher education in Portugal. Despite differences among the study programs, the findings reveal that the standard five courses recommendation by the Commission on Public Relations Education (CPRE) are a part of Portuguese undergraduate curriculum. This includes 12 of the 14 content field guidelines needed to achieve the ideal master's program. Data shows, however, the difficulty of positioning public relations in Portugal as an autonomous field within Communication Sciences.

Introduction

The Portuguese higher education system has public and private universities with 1st (BA), 2nd (Master) and 3rd degree cycles (PhD). Formal public relations (PR) education in Portugal emerged in the 1960s but the boom is in the late 1980s with the multiplication of courses in Journalism and Communication Sciences. Nevertheless, there are few studies focusing specifically on Portuguese PR education (Gonçalves, 2009). This study fills a research gap by examining the status quo of the contemporary educational environment and by identifying its unique characteristics through international studies.

The Professional Bond framework, issued by the CPRE (2006), the EduProject (Cotton et al., 2009) developed by EUPRERA, and the Global Education Project generated by the Global Alliance (Tench and Deflagbe, 2008, Toth and Aldoory, 2010) were studied and compared for the analysis. The following research questions were posed:

RQ1

What is the profile of Portuguese BA and Master's degrees in public relations found on the Web?

RQ2

To what extent do the Portuguese BA programs in PR reflect the five-course standard recommendation of The Professional Bond?

RQ3

To what extent do the 14 content areas recommendation (The Professional Bond) apply or not to Portuguese Master's degrees in PR?

Section snippets

Methods

A qualitative content analysis was conducted where the unit of analysis was each BA and Master's program in PR found on the Web. We searched for programs being offered at public schools, as well as the program designation and number of ECTS.1 We studied 14 BA and 8 MA programs. The programs of study were coded for the presence of

BA programs in communication/PR

In terms of program names there are no BA programs in Portugal with the sole designation of “Public Relations” and “Communication Sciences” is the most common nomenclature. All the BA programs have a total of 180 ECTS and the duration of 6 semesters. The average that PR courses represent in terms of ECTS total does not exceed 59.17%. The other courses are distributed among Sociology, Communication Theory, Statistics, History, Business, Advertising and Marketing courses.

When considering the

Conclusions

The data show that the majority of Portuguese PR programs are integrated in the Communication Sciences field. The fact that all the curricula had disciplines within the scope of Liberal Arts, Social Sciences and Business was evident when analyzing the BA programs. The importance given to disciplines centered on public relations is not as consensual when comparing the syllabi of the disciplines vis-à-vis the five PR study areas recommended by the CPRE and the weight of ECTS. “PR Research,

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