PRCA-24 data 2012-2017 pre-intervention dataset

The Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) (McCroskey, 1970) is a widely used questionnaire designed to guage the levels of apprehension respondents feel towards four modes of oral communication, namely dyad (one-to-one), group discussion, formal meeting and public speaking. Furthermore, despite the questionnaire assessing four modes of oral communication, it is the most widely used assessment of public speaking anxiety (Sawyer, 2016). The dataset has the results of the administration of the PRCA-24 questionnaire over a six year period (2012-2017) with undergraduate accounting and finance students studying at a university in the north of England as they begin their first year of study. In addition to the results of the PRCA-24 questionnaire, for the years 2013-2017 an additional task requires participants to respond to, 'Please write about your experiences of giving class presentations or speaking to an audience in other situations' after completion of the PRCA-24. Thus the dataset has one qualitative item. In addition to the PRCA-24 data items include the year of the response, whether the participant's first language was English and the gender of respondents. The dataset has 702 cases. Data for the year 2015 is analysed in Ireland (2020). Ireland, C. (2020) Apprehension felt towards delivering oral presentations: a case study of accountancy students, Accounting Education, 29:3, 305-320, DOI: 10.1080/09639284.2020.1737548 McCroskey, J. C. (1970). Special reports: Measures of communication-bound anxiety. Speech Monographs, 37(4), 269–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637757009375677 Sawyer, C. R. (2016). Communication apprehension and public speaking Instruction. In P. Witt (Ed.), Communication and learning (pp. 397–426). De Gruyter.