Exposure: Theory and Evidence About All the Ways It Matters

Much work on the public health communication component of social marketing focuses on message development. But there is good evidence that failure and success in public health communication is better predicted by variation in exposure to messages achieved than it is by variation in quality of messages. The inconsistent results about effects from some major projects (Stanford Heart Disease, Minnesota Heart Health, Pawtucket Heart Health, COMMIT) may reflect their lack of success in obtaining heavy exposure to their messages. Those results contrast with the successful results of a variety of other programs, particularly kitchen sink programs, which have been able to obtain higher levels of exposure and have some evidence of important effects

Communication as a Complement in Development

This article is a revised version of a paper produced as part of a review of Agency for International Development policy in communication undertaken by Stanford University\u27s Institute for Communication Research for which Edwin Parker and the author were co-principal investigators. Others contributed heavily to earlier drafts of this paper and the background papers on which it was based (see 7, 8, 13, 14, 18). They include (in alphabetical order) Ronny Adhikarya, Eduardo Contreras-Budge, Dennis Foote, Douglas Goldschmidt, John Mayo, Emile McAnany, Jeanne Moulton, Jeremiah O\u27Sullivan, Edwin Parker, Everett Rogers, and Douglas Solomon. The we used in the text is neither royal nor editorial, but refers to some subset of the author and this list of contributors. The work was performed under contract ta-C-1472 with the Development Support Bureau (Office of Education and Human Resources) of USAID, and benefited from advice from Clifford Block, Anthony Meyer, and David Sprague of that office

Evaluating Communication Campaigns

Summarizes presentations from a September 2007 conference on evaluating communication campaigns. Discusses the mechanism of effecting change through communication; the principles of advocacy evaluation; the design, methods, and tools; and lessons learned

The Best Laid Plans: Disappointments of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign

As part of its war on drugs, the U.S. government spent nearly $1 billion between 1998 and 2004 for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. The campaign had three goals: educating children and teenagers (ages 9 to18) on how to reject illegal drugs, preventing them from starting drug use, and convincing occasional users to stop. Analyzing the effects of this campaign is important not only for future funding decisions but also for more effective targeting of future efforts. This Issue Brief summarizes a Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the campaign’s effects on youths’ cognitions and behavior around marijuana use

Using Theory to Design Evaluations of Communication Campaigns: The Case of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign

We present a general theory about how campaigns can have effects and suggest that the evaluation of communication campaigns must be driven by a theory of effects. The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign illustrates both the theory of campaign effects and implications that theory has for the evaluation design. Often models of effect assume that individual exposure affects cognitions that continue to affect behavior over a short term. Contrarily, effects may operate through social or institutional paths as well as through individual learning, require substantial levels of exposure achieved through multiple channels over time, take time to accumulate detectable change, and affect some members of the audience but not others. Responsive evaluations will choose appropriate units of analysis and comparison groups, data collection schedules sensitive to lagged effects, samples able to detect subgroup effects, and analytic strategies consistent with the theory of effects that guides the campaign