Hello fellow communications professionals and students.

My name is Heath Weber, and I am a graduate student within Ohio State’s
School of Journalism and Communication and a public relations professional
at a major health care provider. I’m working with Dr. Susan Kline on a
public relations study for my Master’s thesis at Ohio State University.
Being communications professionals, we hope you would be so inclined to
provide data for the research, as the completion of the study will result in
further enriching the field in which we work.

The means of data collection is a questionnaire designed to elicit your
responses about corporate crisis situations and the ways companies respond
to these crises. It contains a variety of items on which I ask you to rate
based upon the information given and your knowledge. Please understand that
there are no “right” or “wrong” answers, so if you do elect to participate,
please provide your honest responses.

By participating in this study, you may benefit by thinking about new ways
to manage crisis situations that affect your organization’s credibility.
You would, of course, also be providing data to further enhance our field’s
research, which proves useful when it is applied to practical events.

Participation is obviously voluntary. Completion and return of the
questionnaire will imply your consent to participate. Please be aware,
however, that I cannot assure your confidentiality if you save your data on
your work computer, or if you send the information to me from a work
computer. You can rest assured, however, that I will remove any and all
identifiers from the data you provide to ensure it is not linked to you,
although you won’t be providing any sensitive information anyway. Also, the
data will be stored in a secure location where only I and my research
colleague can access it.

The questionnaire should take you about an hour to complete. It’s a
Microsoft Word document, so you can just type your answers in the spaces
provided, and save the file. Once you are finished, please return the
completed questionnaire (your saved file) to me at heath_weber@....

Lastly, completion of the survey at work, during normal work hours, may be a
breach of you company’s policies. I encourage you to comply with your
company’s policies regarding requests of this nature.

If you choose to participate, I will send each of you a final copy of the
study.

Please send e-mail to me at heath_weber@... to let me know if you
are interested in participating, and I will be glad to send you the
questionnaire.

Thank you for your time.
Heath Weber

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