Evaluation of Metaphoric Perceptions of Students Studying in the Department of Public Relations and Publicity at the Faculty of Communication about Public Relations

Public relations are a kind of science and profession based on communication, which have roles such as making an interaction, agreement and reconciliation between the institution and publics thereof. Public relations are closely related to various branches of science. This relationship leads to some uncertainties at the point where the concept of public relations can be understood and identified. For this reason, different metaphors can be encountered in defining the concept of public relations. Metaphor means describing something with something else that is assumed to be similar to it. In this way, people are able to make metaphorical explanations by using other entities similar to that when they will tell anything. This study was carried out in order to identify the metaphorical perceptions (mental image) of the students studying in the department of public relations and publicity at the faculty of communication about the concept of public relations. The participants were asked to complete the sentence "public relations are..., because……” to determine the metaphors they had about the concept of public relations. In this respect, the research was designed according to a phenomenological pattern and the data collected were tested by the content analysis method. 37 different metaphors have emerged according to the answers obtained and these metaphors have been collected under the categories of public relations as "communication method", "humanized feature", "mediator" and "nature features". It has been concluded that the participants have achieved some positive metaphors about the public relations, although they also correlate the negative metaphors to the public relations. The results show that the participants are influenced by the theoretical framework given to them during the public relations training. In addition, public relations training can help clarify the perceptual framework about the concept of public relations. However, it has also been observed that some of the metaphors expressed by the participants do not have a correlation with the training received