Contact: John Burrow
STARKVILLE, Miss.—For his work on post-crisis communication, a Mississippi State faculty member is receiving the Top Paper Award in Public Relations from the National Communication Association.
Tyler Page, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, will be formally recognized with a certificate of achievement during the NCA’s annual conference this month in Baltimore, Maryland. He also will present two papers and serve as a session respondent.
“The paper is about how pre-existing relationships influence reputation following a crisis. Specifically, my team was able to look at how positive, pre-existing relationships influence perceptions of a crisis—how offensive an organization’s actions are, how its response is perceived, and how those things influence post-crisis reputation,” Page said.
Using a fictional scandal as the basis of his research, Page asked participants to read about accusations of cheating involving participants’ favorite organizations as well as organizations they did not like. He found that “pre-existing relationships influence perceptions of crisis but also perceptions of crisis responses such as denial or apology.”
“These perceptions were much stronger than the effects of the crisis response strategies themselves,” Page said. “In other words, a reader’s pre-existing relationship with the team had a much bigger effect on the team’s reputation than whether the team denied responsibility or apologized for the incident.”
“The NCA is one of the preeminent organizations in this discipline,” said Terry Likes, professor and communication department head. “We are so very happy for Dr. Page.”
An MSU faculty member since 2018, Page said he believes “relationships matter,” noting his interest in how “pre-existing relationships and attitudes blur perceptions of reality” led to his research topic.
“We tend to perceive people we like more favorably during a crisis and people we dislike less favorably,” he said. “Unfortunately, we live in a world with a lot of crisis situations. For organizations, it is important to treat others well and build relationships before a crisis.”
Page received his bachelor’s degree in communication and master’s degree in mass communication, both from Brigham Young University. He earned his Ph.D. in communication in 2018 from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a member of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, complete details about the Department of Communication may be found at www.comm.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.