Severity, Efficacy, and Evidence Type as Determinants of Health Message Exposure

This cross-cultural experiment examined the effectiveness of three health message characteristics to foster or inhibit selective exposure to health information. An online magazine was created with eight articles about various health risks. Four articles were manipulated regarding (1) severity of the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Health communication 2013-05, Vol.28 (4), p.378-388
Main Authors: Hastall, Matthias R., Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Consequences
Cross cultural studies
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Effectiveness studies
Efficacy
Female
Germany
Health
Health Communication - methods
Health education
Humans
Information processing
International comparisons
Male
Mass Media
Negative events
Persuasive Communication
Selective exposure
Severity
Students
United States
Universities
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This cross-cultural experiment examined the effectiveness of three health message characteristics to foster or inhibit selective exposure to health information. An online magazine was created with eight articles about various health risks. Four articles were manipulated regarding (1) severity of the described health threat (low versus high), (2) suggested efficacy to avoid or minimize negative consequences (low versus high) and (3) type of evidence presented (statistical information versus exemplar information). Respondents from the U.S. and from Germany (n = 301/298) browsed through the magazine while selective exposure was unobtrusively logged. Findings reveal country-specific exposure patterns. A positive main effect of severity was only found for U.S. respondents. Independent of respondents' country, significantly more time was spent with low-severity/high-efficacy messages and high-severity/low-efficacy messages than with articles featuring the often-recommended high-severity/high-efficacy message combination. Respondents generally read more exemplar messages than those with statistical evidence, especially when high efficacy was suggested. Implications of these exposure patterns for the real-life effectiveness of health messages are discussed and an improved theoretical conceptualization of message effectiveness is proposed.
ISSN:1041-0236
1532-7027
DOI:10.1080/10410236.2012.690175