Organ donation is an important social issue because thousands of people need donated organs in order to survive chronic diseases. These people depend on the goodwill of donors to provide them with life-sustaining organs after the potential donors die. However, there is a chronic shortage of donors and organs. To reduce the shortage, social advertising can be a valuable tool in informing the public about the need for organ donation and in allaying fears about the process. In this study, a social advertising approach was used to empirically examine the differences between Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans of comparable socioeconomic status in their response to organ donation public service announcements.

This study examined the effects of sex and attitudes toward women on different cognitive measures that were obtained after "liberal" and "nonliberal" male and female subjects viewed 12 television commercials: 6 commercials depicted "traditional" female roles and 6 were "neutral." The dependent variables included (1) ratings of the commercials, (2) objections to the commercials, (3) perceived content or interpretation of the commercials, and (4) willingness to buy. The results suggested that liberals had more objections to the stereotypic commercials and that they rated and interpreted some of them more negatively when compared with nonliberals. Liberals were also less willing to buy some of the products after viewing traditional commercials. The findings were discussed with reference to Bem's (1981) gender schema theory.Many researchers believe that television commercials are extremely powerful in promoting traditional sex-role attitudes (

No abstract