Kentucky group receives fifth round of funding from NIH

R. Lewis Donohew, Philip Palmgreen, and Elizabeth Lorch, of the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky, have just received grants totaling $2.8 million from two agencies of the National Institutes of Health to support the continuation of their work on developing anti-drug television public service announcements. These grants represent the fifth time the National Institutes of Health have supported the Kentucky group’s work.

The work of Donohew and associates has been focused on reducing drug use among adolescents through the development of television-based campaigns. The team has been focusing their attention on how to design messages for differing levels of sensation seeking. Sensation seeking is a psychological variable that is associated with what Donohew calls, “the need for novel, complex, ambiguous, and emotionally intense stimuli.”  Sensation seeking is a predictor of drug use; in fact, a series of studies have indicated that both sensation seeking and drug use may involve similar chemical reactions in the brain.

The Kentucky group’s previous research has indicated that reaching high sensation seekers requires significantly different persuasive communication strategies than does reaching low sensation seekers. Messages that are intense, fast-paced, and dramatic are likely to be persuasive to high sensation seekers, while messages that are low in sensation value are likely to be persuasive to low sensation seekers. Moreover, the researchers found that placing these messages into television programming of like sensation content increased the message’s chance of being watched, remembered and acted upon by its target audience.

Most of this work has been done in the laboratory, however, and so the current funding provides an opportunity to launch a two-city campaign and to evaluate the results. In so doing, Donohew and associates have six primary objectives: (1) to test the actual ability of the campaign to reach its target audience; (2) to test how the campaign changes drug-related attitudes, beliefs, and behavior over time; (3) to see how a follow-up campaign boosts the effects of the initial campaign; (4) to see how the effects of the television campaign change in the target audience over time; and (5) to see how drug-related attitudes influence drug-using behavior over time.

The initial campaign will be aired in the Lexington, Kentucky, area in 1997. A year later, a follow-up campaign will be aired in Lexington and also in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area. Eight months prior to the first campaign the research team will begin to conduct interviews on drug-related attitudes and behaviors from samples of randomly-selected high school students in the two counties, and these interviews (up to a total of 6,400) will continue over a 32-month period. Researchers at the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Tennessee will participate in collecting the Knoxville data.

As Donohew has noted, designing effective anti-drug public service announcements is a difficult task because the spots must attract the casual viewer, motivate the viewer to continue watching after initial attention has been gained, and then persuading the viewer to adopt or avoid certain behaviors. The advantage to undertaking this study is that this research team has spent a considerable amount of energy learning in the laboratory what works and what doesn’t in terms of message design and audience segmentation. With the ongoing support of the National Institutes of Health, the team is ready to try out their laboratory results in the field, potentially yielding means by which successful anti-drug campaigns may be conducted.