Applying Situational Communication Theory to an International Political Problem: Two Studies

Abstract

Two Hong Kong telephone surveys, in 1983 and 1985, assess the applicability of Grunig's situational theory of publics, developed in organizational and environmental contexts, to a political problem, the return of Hong Kong to China in July 1997. Theses studies also explore the relationship between instrumental utility and opinion publics. In 1985, but not in 1983, the theory consistently predicted which publics would talk about the “1997 problem,” but those patterns did not hold for media use. Extrinsic utility discriminated between levels of involvement but not opinion publics. Information relevance was situation specific and discriminated among publics and between levels of involvement, although somewhat inconsistently. The problem-specific measures appear to function better within the theory's context.