Dear Adolescent Health Coordinators (and interested
others):
What follows is an assignment
for a Liberal Studies class at the University of Minnesota. As many of you
know, I’m trying to add some initials to my name and taking the opportunity to learn
more that I can apply to our collective challenge: doing right by young people.
In this case, the class was
about Fear. Over the course of a day, the professor gave us bite-size morsels from
a variety of disciplines that study fear: everything from morality/religion to
psychology to addiction treatment. I saw this as an opportunity to explore the
literature about sending fear messages to adolescents in public health
campaigns.
Background
Hanging out with you all, I
picked up the conventional wisdom (based on the literature I assume, since you
all are always about the literature) that scary, gross looking images of
diseases were not an effective health communication for adolescents. During the time we’ve been working together,
the shaming, blaming “your life will be ruined by teen pregnancy” ad campaigns,
sensational cable TV programming about life as a teen mom and the recent public
health efforts targeting obesity by fat shaming kids and blaming their parents.
And then there was that meth campaign. High production values, dramatic and
scary as hell (rape, murder, suicide, prostitution) story-lines. Reports I read
said it worked!
Purpose
My goal for this exploration
was to
- See what sort of evidence supported the use or rejection of using fear-based messages in adolescent health campaigns,
- Find out why and how the meth campaign worked
- Find good stuff to support our work – for example, if fear messages don’t work -- what does?
- And as always, I’m looking for insights, tips, concepts that what in the might improve inform the use of media campaigns and communications to promote adolescent health. (Note: this means I stray a little bit from an exclusive focus on fear campaigns.)
Limitations
Most of you already know that
I have very strong feelings on this subject and that my personal experience (as
an advertising exec and then a public health groupie) colors my perception and
understanding of this topic. I make no
claims that this is a comprehensive review: the citations are linked here. In
considering what to read, I chose some meta-analyses, tracked down the names I
saw most frequently in citations and Googled my way into a drop box that
contained a researcher’s bullet point summary of his meth campaign results analysis
written for the Governor of Montana. I was intrigued by some recent brain
research (how adolescents deal with fear) and wandered into skin cancer and
sunscreen use promotion. While typing up my references I was struck by the
diversity of my reading – not unlike the class session itself – I read journals
from the fields of psychology, health communication, health education, public
policy and marketing, medicine, sex research, community health dermatology,
marketing, and prevention science.
Without further hedging, the
following are my thoughts on we all should know about fear and public health
messages. Here's a glimpse of what is to follow, after the jump:
- Fear messages in public health campaigns aren’t effective.
- Measuring behavior change (the desired outcome of fear campaigns) is mostly bogus.
- Theoretical models of fear processing are cool!
- The unintended consequences are SCARY.
- Developmental Insights!
- The meth Campaign
- Glynis' reading of the adolescent brain research on fear
- Citations
