Vested interest, disaster preparedness, and strategic campaign message design.
In recent years, the United States has recognized an increasing need for individual-level disaster preparedness, with federal, state, and local government agencies finding only limited success in instituting campaign-based disaster preparedness programs. Extant research indicates Americans generally remain poorly informed and badly unprepared for imminent disasters. Vested interest theory (Crano, 1997) is presented as a framework for designing and testing the effectiveness of television-based disaster preparedness campaign messages. High- and low-vested versions of an extant control message are compared to assess message efficacy as indicated by behavioral intentions, message acceptance, and preparedness related attitudes. Results indicate television-based video public service announcements manipulated with subtle message variations can be effective at influencing critical preparedness-related attitudes. The high-vested condition performed significantly better than the low-vested and control conditions for both behavioral intentions and perceptions of self-efficacy, two vitally important outcome variables associated with disaster preparedness.
a The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication , Arizona State University.
Bradley J
BJ
Adame
Claude H
CH
Miller
D000293:Adolescent; D001290:Attitude; D004189:Disaster Planning; D005260:Female; D058015:Health Communication / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011582:Psychological Theory; D066308:Public Service Announcements as Topic; D013690:Television; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult