Discuss the effectiveness of health promotion strategies

FONTS

Discuss the effectiveness of health promotion strategies.

Fear Appeals

VERB Campaign

Effectiveness of Health Campaigns

• Fear appeals try to create fear so that behavior is changed or avoid this behavior.
• Sometimes this can be ineffective because someone might think that it would be more difficult or there would be a bigger difficulty such as cost that is stopping them. This is portrayed in the Health Belief Model

Pechmann and Reibling (2006)

The aim of this study is to find out the effectiveness of 8 types of antismoking advertisements. Ninth graders from California public schools were randomly assigned to watch a TV show that had ads for antismoking or just control ads and participants were asked questions pertaining to smoking and the ad. It was found that ads that focused more on the suffering that comes from tobacco created a sense of disgust and reduced the participants intent on smoking.

• It is usually argued that health campaigns are not effective because they don't change people's habits.
• Usually campaigns portray what is the correct thing, such as not smoking or what is considered to be a healthy lifestyle, but needs to be based on people's lives to be effective.

Evaluation

• effects on smoking behavior was not studied
• low representational generalization because freshmen students from California were used
• low ecological validity because the study was not conducted in a natural environment

• The VERB Campaign ran from 2002-2006 and used different types of commercial marketing strategies in order to persuade children ages 9-13 to be physically active everyday.
• Huhman et al. (2005)- The aim of this study was to investigate whether campaigns were effective to create awareness and promote physical activity and a large scale survey was given. Results showed that after one year 74% of the children were aware of the VERB Campaign. For the children who were aware of the campaign they had an increase in free-time physical activity.
• This study shows that commercial advertising in health promotion could be effective.

Evaluation of the Huhman et al. (2005) study

• Self-report data, since a survey was used in the methodology which could question if all participants were being truthful
• Longitudinal study becuase it was conducted over the course of one year and this could lead to some people dropping out of the study.
• high ecological validity because the study was conducted in a natural environment

Health Promotion Strategies

• Health promotion can be defined as "the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health."
• Health is something that can be promoted, but this can be difficult because of habits that people have.
• People who are more formally educated are more likely to have healthy habits.
• Modern health promotions include different education programs that raise awareness to the public, public health campaigns, public and private health services, and different political activities.

Persuasive Communication

Media

• The source- the person that is communicating the message should be trustworthy
• The audience should be able to understand the message
• The message should be short, clear, and direct
• The audience should participate in the communication so that the attitude can change

• Media plays a very crucial role in modern health promotion.
• Media can raise awareness of different health issues, but it can't change behavior because it has to be combined with other things as well.
• The media campaigns can really only convey simple messages.

TRUTH CAMPAIGN

• Anti-tobacco campaign in Florida in 1998-1999
• The whole idea of the campaign was to change teens' attitude and to encourage them to form groups and spread their message to the community
• The messsage was spread through massive advertising such as TV commercials, billboards, posters, and the Internet.

Sly et al. (2002)

The aim of this study was to find out if anti-tobacco advertisements had an effect on attitude changes so that non-smokers would remain non-smokers. 22 months after the campaign, the participants who aged from 12 to 17 were surveyed. It was found that the participants that had more exposure to the campaign had a negative attitude toward the tobacco industry. This shows that health campaigns can be effective because in this campaign it was possible to change people's attitude because the campaign had a clear message on a specific audience.

Limitations of Sly et al. (2002) study

• self-report data because a survey was used
• low representation generalization because it was only conducted on teenagers
• high ecological validity becuase it was conducted in a natural setting