Mass Media, Social Control, and Health Behavior Change: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media Effects on Drunk-Driving Behavior, 1978-1995

Previous research in the area of public health communication has predominantly focused on a direct association between information in the media and health behavior change. The dissertation seeks to broaden this theoretical framework by examining complementary routes of media effects on behavior. Specifically, it is argued that by stimulating response from social institutions and facilitating change in the social acceptability of problem behaviors, the media may set in motion formal and informal mechanisms of social control that lead to behavior change. This proposition was tested in relation to the decline in drunk-driving (DO) behavior in between 1978 and 1995. In the first step, an elaborated content analysis procedure revealed that the grassroots movement against DO was instrumental in setting the media agenda for the DO problem but was no more influential than policy-makers. In the next step, the results demonstrated that policy-makers\u27 actions followed the frames and solutions advocated in the media and that the impact of news stories on policy-makers\u27 attention and behavior was primarily manifested in periods of intensive policy-making. The third step of the analysis tested hypotheses regarding the media\u27s contribution to the emergence of an unequivocal social norm against DO. The findings suggested a small independent contribution of media coverage to social disapproval of DD but could not convincingly distinguish between a direct effect (through social learning) and a mediated effect (through social interaction). In the final step, an analysis of all three routes of media effects on DD behavior (I.e., media-behavior, media-policy-behavior, and media-norm-behavior) provided some compelling evidence of mediated media effects on DO behavior and some ambiguous findings regarding direct media effects. In addition, there was evidence that media effects on DO behavior varied by the level of resistance demonstrated by drivers of different age groups to different types of social control efforts. Overall, the results of this study support the argument that by neglecting to consider media effects on health behavior change that are mediated by other social structures, previous studies may have underestimated the contribution of mass communication channels to processes of health behavior change

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

A Theory-Grounded Measure of Adolescents\u27 Response to Media Literacy Interventions

Media literacy interventions offer relatively new and promising avenues for the prevention of risky health behaviors among children and adolescents, but current literature remains largely equivocal about their efficacy. We propose that (a) much of this ambiguity stems from the lack of conceptual clarity in the literature regarding the cognitive process through which media literacy interventions influence their target audience, and (b) that the ability to track this cognitive process by means of valid and reliable measures is necessary to evaluating the effects of media literacy programs on their audience. Accordingly, the primary objective of this study was to develop and test theoretically-grounded measures of audiences’ degree of engagement with the content of media literacy programs based on the recognition that engagement (and not participation per se) can better explain and predict individual variations in the effects of these programs. We tested the validity and reliability of this measure with two different samples of 10th grade high school students (Study I N = 294; Study II N = 171) who participated in a pilot and actual test of a brief media literacy curriculum. Responses to an inventory of items measuring evaluation of the media literacy program underwent an exploratory factor analysis for Study I. Four message evaluation factors (involvement, perceived novelty, critical thinking, personal reflection) emerged and were confirmed through CFA (Study II), demonstrating acceptable reliability as scales as well as item-level convergent validity and convergent and discriminant validity with other measures. We discuss the implications of including process of effect measures in the design and evaluation of media literacy interventions