Summary
Contents
Advances in health care have made extraordinary changes in the life expectancy and level of vitality of the average American. Still, according to the U. S. Surgeon General, a full one-half of all premature deaths are due to lifestyle and, therefore, preventable. This important collection presents a comparative synthesis of what works and what does not in mass media health campaigns. High priority is given to coverage of substance abuse prevention campaigns, but programs on AIDS, smoking, teenage pregnancy, heart disease, Alzheimer's Disease, and vehicle seat belt use are also reviewed. Designing Health Communication Campaigns deepens our understanding of how to design, implement, and evaluate mass media campaigns by highlighting the contributions of media experts who add a human element to the various campaign experiences they describe. This work is indispensable in a fast-evolving field where it serves as both a reference and a concordance for interpreting many other analytic sources. Campaign designers, researchers, communications scholars and graduate students as well as policymakers and program funders will find the book to be valuable in helping make critical decisions about effective mass communication campaigns. “This volume is valuable because it emphasizes actual experiences, and is thus recommended as an adjunct to classic texts in the field. Graduate; faculty; professional.” – Choice
Implications and Future Directions
Our comparative study of campaigns and the experts who shape them has resulted in a confirmation of some basic principles for health communication campaign success that seem to be fairly common across topical areas, and also has identified a number of issues that need further exploration. In this final section, we present some implications for future campaign design and for research.
Implications for Campaign Design
It is hoped that the generalizations listed in Part II can be applied to campaign design and execution. For instance, it may be helpful to create a “checklist” of desirable campaign features based upon these generalizations. Then any campaign design can be compared against this checklist while it is still in its earliest stages.
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