![]() Glock and Krolak-Schwerdt (2013) explored university students' reactions to five health-related (health) warnings and five (social) warnings countering expectations of positive social and relaxing utilities of alcohol. With one group of participants exposed to the health and one group exposed to the social warnings. Findings showed that explicit attitude towards drinking alcohol did not differ across the two groups. However the participants differed in their implicit attitude with those in the social warning label group having less positive attitudes towards alcohol and those in the health group having more positive implicit attitudes. Jarvis and Pettigrew (2013) explored negative and positive framed messages (across both health and drink driving contexts) and found that for those who report higher consumption of alcohol, negative health messages had the highest utility. A positive statement about drink driving exhibiting a boomerang effect and positively impacting choice suggesting higher likelihood of purchasing alcohol. Collymore and McDermott (In press) examined social and health messages across gain, fear-loss and disgust-loss conditions, and found that loss-framed messages (and in particular the health disgust-loss with a message about drinking more than government daily limits results in temporary facial imperfections) were most effective in increasing intentions to reduce alcohol consumption.
Conclusion: It is difficult at this point to advocate a particular type of message. This is because there exists little consistent findings with a lack of replication studies limiting the confidence to be gained from the body of knowledge formed to date. Studies so far are based on exploratory methods (such as focus groups), or descriptive studies that utilised small samples, or within designs (by repeated presentations of different warnings) whilst failing to rule out order (carry-over) effects. As a result the field needs more studies that will in time allow a meta-analysis to be conducted to enable a more rigorous assessment of the utility of different types of messages. In the meantime researchers should continue to explore both positively and negatively framed messages and examine potential mediators (e.g., perceived susceptibility) and moderators (e.g., believability) of behavioural change as well as assess for potential defensive reactions or other boomerang effects.
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Conclusion: There is a need for more research regarding the influence of providing a recommendation across different types of messages. These results suggest that providing a recommendation may be beneficial but the efficacy of a recommendation needs to be tested experimentally across a range of different message themes to make a firmer decision on the utility of recommendations.
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Conclusion: It appears from the limited evidence available that quantitative messages are of less utility than qualitative messages but researchers should evaluate the efficacy of quantitative information across a range of message types and frames. In addition to exploring subgroup effects across psychological variables such as need-for-cognition, and demographic factors. |
Factors to consider in the design of alcohol warning labels > What types of alcohol warning statements might be most effective? >