| dc.description.abstract | Crisis communication research has been significantly advanced over the past 50 years with models and theories. But it lacks a method for assigning objective, numerical values to how severe a crisis is on an organization’s image and the organization’s likelihood to survive the crisis. The Crisis Score is the first model to attempt to fill this gap. However, the Crisis Score has been developed strictly from practice and has not been compared to literature in the crisis communication field. In a first attempt to validate this model by testing it against theory, this study utilized a 3 x 2 mixed factorial design with participants recruited from mTurk to determine the effects of brand (prior reputation and crisis history), cause (if crisis was caused by intentional act), and impact (damage inflicted to external stakeholders) on attitudes, purchase intentions, perception of crisis responsibility, and organizational reputation. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted and findings suggest that a good brand, low cause, and low impact yield better attitudes, purchase intentions, organizational reputation, and less perceived crisis responsibility, than a bad brand, high cause, and high impact, respectively. Results contribute to crisis communication literature by reinforcing findings from previous studies and revealing new results that show the Crisis Score has potential to become a useful addition to crisis communication scholarship and practice.
Keywords: Crisis communication, Crisis Score, attribution theory, image repair theory, situational crisis communication theory, SCCT | en_US |
