ABSTRACTS
Volume 13, Number 2
March 2008
Vol. 13, Number2: Contents | Editorial | Abstracts
Alternate Methods of Framing Information About Medication Side Effects: Incremental Risk Versus Total Risk of Occurrence
Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher abc; Angela Fagerlin abc; Todd R. Roberts c; Holly A. Derry c; Peter A. Ubel abcd
a VA Center for Clinical Management Research, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
b Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
c Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
d Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Communications of treatment risk, such as medication package inserts, commonly report total rates of adverse reactions (e.g., 4% get heartburn with placebo, 9% with medication). This approach, however, requires mental arithmetic to distinguish the incremental risk caused by medication (here, 5%) from the total post-treatment risk. In two Internet-administered survey experiments (N = 2,012 and 1,393), we tested whether explicitly reporting the incremental risk and framing it as the “additional risk” of complications influenced people's impressions of adverse event risks. Study 1 compared side-by-side displays of total risks against sequential presentations that highlighted the incremental risk, using both text and graphical formats. Results showed that incremental risk formats significantly lowered participants' worry about complications and reduced biases caused by varying the risk denominator. Study 2 unpacked this factor and showed that its effect on both perceived likelihood and worry derives primarily from the incremental risk framing rather than from sequential presentation. Explicitly reporting incremental risk statistics appears to facilitate recognition of how much risk already exists at baseline. Presenting adverse reaction risks in this manner may improve patient comprehension of the effects of treatment decisions and support effective risk communication.
The 2005 British Columbia Smoking Cessation Mass Media Campaign and Short-term Changes in Smokers Attitudes
Lynda Gagn a
a School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada
The effect of the 2005 British Columbia (BC) smoking cessation mass media campaign on a panel (N = 1,341) of 20-30-year-old smokers' attitudes is evaluated. The 5-week campaign consisted of posters, television, and radio ads about the health benefits of cessation. Small impacts on the panel's attitudes toward the adverse impacts of smoking were found, with greater impacts found for those who had no plans to quit smoking at the initial interview. As smokers with no plans to quit increasingly recognized the adverse impacts of smoking, they also increasingly agreed that they use smoking as a coping mechanism. Smokers with plans to quit at the initial interview already were well aware of smoking's adverse impacts. Respondents recalling the campaign poster, which presented a healthy alternative to smoking, decreased their perception of smoking as a coping mechanism and devalued their attachment to smoking. Evidence was found that media ad recall mediates unobserved predictors of attitudes toward smoking.
The Perceived Effectiveness of Persuasive Messages: Questions of Structure, Referent, and Bias
James Price Dillard a; Sun Ye b
a Department of Communication Arts & Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
b Department of Advertising, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA
To gain a sense of the persuasive efficacy of a message prior to implementation of a campaign, researchers often gather judgments of perceived effectiveness (PE). At present, they do so without much knowledge of the conceptual meaning or empirical properties of PE. In the spirit of construct explication, we report a study intended to address a series of questions about PE. Using student (N = 155) and community samples (N = 100), we found the following: (a) PE is a two-dimensional judgment involving global evaluations of message impact and specific judgments of message attributes, but it may be reducible to a single second-order factor, (b) most individuals reported using more than one referent (i.e., person or group) when making PE judgments, but the choice of referents varies by message and judge, and (c) judgments of PE are biased upward as a function of the number of referents chosen. Suggestions are offered for enhancing the validity of PE judgments in formative campaign research.
Getting to Know the Competition: A Content Analysis of Publicly and Corporate Funded Physical Activity Advertisements
Tanya R. Berry a; Ron E. McCarville b; Ryan E. Rhodes c
a Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
b Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
c School of Physical Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
The purpose of this research was to conduct a content analysis of physical activity advertisements in an effort to determine which advertisements were more likely to include features that may attract and maintain attention levels. Fifty-seven advertisements were collected from top circulation Canadian magazines. The advertisements ranged from publicly funded health promotion pieces to corporate sponsored advertisements using physical activity to sell a product. Advertisements were examined for textual and pictorial factors thought to increase attention allocated to advertising of this nature. Only two public health advertisements were found, and the majority of advertisements (57.9%) were from commercial advertisers using physical activity images to sell products or to encourage brand recognition. The advertisements originating with the private sector tended to possess most of the characteristics thought to attract the attention of readers. Once this attention was gained, however, most of these advertisements failed to highlight the benefits of physical activity. As a result, the positive effect of these advertisements may have been compromised. Public health advertisements were so infrequent that we could not compare their characteristics with those originating with the private sector. The characteristics with those we did find were inconsistent with those thought to attract and maintain attention levels. Results are discussed in terms of potential implications for promoting physical activity.
Cancer News Coverage and Information Seeking
Jeff Niederdeppe a; Dominick L. Frosch b; Robert C. Hornik c
a School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
b Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
c Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
The shift toward viewing patients as active consumers of health information raises questions about whether individuals respond to health news by seeking additional information. This study examines the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking using a national survey of adults aged 18 years and older. A Lexis-Nexis database search term was used to identify Associated Press (AP) news articles about cancer released between October 21, 2002, and April 13, 2003. We merged these data to the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a telephone survey of 6,369 adults, by date of interview. Logistic regression models assessed the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking. Overall, we observed a marginally significant positive relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking (p 0.07). Interaction terms revealed that the relationship was apparent only among respondents who paid close attention to health news (p 0.01) and among those with a family history of cancer (p 0.05). Results suggest that a notable segment of the population actively responds to periods of elevated cancer news coverage by seeking additional information, but they raise concerns about the potential for widened gaps in cancer knowledge and behavior between large segments of the population in the future.
Book Review
A Review of: “Fort, M., Mercer, M. A., & Gish, O. (Eds.). (2004). Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health.”
C. Turner Steckline
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