Serving the public? A content analysis of COVID-19 public service announcements airing from March – December of 2020 in the U.S

Tait, Margaret; Abrams, Jake; Brehm, Robert; Baum, Laura; Fowler, Erika Franklin; Niederdeppe, Jeff; Gollust, Sarah E.

doi:10.1016/j.pmedr.2022.101971

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Almost all (99.5%) of the airings included Ad Council branding, often alongside the other federal designations. In a previous study, we examined the health informational content of these ads, including celebrities depicted, the major health messages broadcast, and attention to groups at risk [ 25 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Television airings of U.S. federal COVID-19 public service announcements in 2020 were associated with market-level political orientation, not COVID-19 rates

Gollust

Frenier²,

Tait³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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Televised public service announcements were one of the ways that the U.S. federal government distributed health information about the COVID-19 pandemic to Americans in 2020. However, little is known about the reach of these campaigns or the populations who might have been exposed to the information these ads conveyed. We conducted a descriptive analysis of federally-affiliated public service announcement airings to assess where they were aired and the market-level social and demographic characteristics associated with the airings. We found no correspondence between airings and COVID-19 incidence rates from March to December 2020, but we found a positive association between airings and the Democratic vote share of the market, adjusting for other market demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that PSAs may have contributed to divergent exposure to health information among the U.S. public during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Television airings of U.S. federal COVID-19 public service announcements in 2020 were associated with market-level political orientation, not COVID-19 rates

Gollust

Frenier²,

Tait³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

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“…PSAs are often used in health campaigns to promote desirable behavior (e.g., getting a flu vaccine) or discourage unhealthy behavior (e.g., texting while driving, vaping). PSAs air on television, radio, and on social media platforms and provide messages designed to present information to the public and persuade people to alter their behavior to reduce risks to themselves as well as others (Tait et al, 2022). PSAs may be particularly persuasive among college students since their attitudes may be less crystallized than attitudes among older individuals (Sears, 1986).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A handful of scholars have begun to explore the content and impact of PSAs advocating COVID-19 safety precautions. For example, Tait et al (2022) conducted a content analysis of COVID-19 PSA airing between March 12 and December 16, 2020 in the United States and found the most common health guidance offered in the PSAs was to stay home (81%), practice social distancing (62%) and wash hands (54%) with 36% of the PSA airings encouraging mask wearing. Greene et al (2022) conducted a survey as well as a randomized survey experiment to examine whether exposure to PSAs advocating wearing masks influences behaviors, finding exposure to these PSAs “increased support for face masks and induced greater compliance with public health advice.” (Greene et al, 2022, p. 7).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

How College Students React to COVID Vaccine PSAs: An Experimental Investigation

Fridkin,

Horsting,

Brown

et al. 2023

American Politics Research

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We explore how political and psychological factors condition the effectiveness of PSAs promoting COVID-19 vaccines. Targeting college students, we utilize a pretest-posttest experiment to examine how different PSAs (emotional, informational, and humorous) influence students’ emotional reactions and assessments of the PSAs. Further, we assess whether the PSAs are able to influence learning and persuasion. We find certain PSAs are more effective at changing people’s attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine and the impact of these messages depends on people’s political and psychological predispositions. The informational PSA produces learning, regardless of students’ receptivity to pro-vaccine messaging. However, the humorous and emotional PSAs encourages learning only for those who are already receptive to the vaccine. These findings have implications for future public health campaigns aimed at college students, suggesting PSA campaigns developed to battle new health crises should be launched quickly before people develop strong attitudes about the emerging crisis.

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“Should I keep washing my groceries?“: Predictors of differential patterns of contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic

Wilkerson,

McKay

2024

Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders

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Serving the public? A content analysis of COVID-19 public service announcements airing from March – December of 2020 in the U.S

Cited by 5 publications

References 30 publications

Television airings of U.S. federal COVID-19 public service announcements in 2020 were associated with market-level political orientation, not COVID-19 rates

Television airings of U.S. federal COVID-19 public service announcements in 2020 were associated with market-level political orientation, not COVID-19 rates

How College Students React to COVID Vaccine PSAs: An Experimental Investigation

“Should I keep washing my groceries?“: Predictors of differential patterns of contamination-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic

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