Persuasiveness of Hiv/aids Public Service Announcements as a Function of Argument Quality, Personal Relevance, and Evidence Form

Abstract

We conducted an experiment with a mixed factorial design to examine how HIV/AIDS public service announcements (PSAs) that varied in quality of argument, level of personal relevance, and form of evidence, affected attitude and behavioral intention toward condom use with main and nonmain partners. Participants were 85 heterosexually active young adults at a northeastern university in the United States. Results showed that argument quality influenced attitude toward condom use regardless of partner type, and level of personal relevance influenced attitude toward condom use with main partners but not with nonmain partners. There was no difference in attitude or behavioral intention according to whether the evidence was narrative or statistical. The attitudinal effect of personal relevance was more prominent in narrative than in statistical PSAs.

Web-Based Behavioral Intervention Utilizing Narrative Persuasion for HIV Prevention Among Chinese Men Who Have Sex With Men (HeHe Talks Project): Intervention Development

“…Several studies [36][37][38][39][40][41] have applied narrative communication to HIV prevention, but there are some critical research gaps. First, most narratives took the form of fictional stories (eg, entertainment-education soap opera) that were scripted by researchers; its efficacy in improving HIV-preventive behaviors is controversial [36,37].…”

“…Second, some interventions involved multiple behavior change strategies (eg, condom distribution), and thus, made it difficult to isolate the specific effect of the narrative component [ 38 ]. Third, the majority of previous narrative interventions addressed heterosexual risk for HIV [ 39 , 40 ]; we suppose that efficacy of narrative interventions is higher among homosexual people because HIV prevention is more personally relevant to this population group, and personal relevance of a health topic can enhance narrative efficacy [ 41 ]. Finally, no studies have been conducted among Asian populations.…”