A researcher from the University of Granada has analysed for the first time the impact of HIV/AIDS preventive advertising in the adolescent population, studying in detail the influence of the campaigns promoted by the Spanish government in the last 15 years. The work has proved that the campaign Preventing AIDS is up to you, started by the Ministry of Health in 1997, has been the most striking among the young up to date.
This pioneer work has been carried out by doctor Juana María Bretón López, and supervised by Professor Gualberto Buela Casal, of the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment of the UGR. This research work intends to analyse the usefulness and effectiveness of these campaigns in the prevention of new HIV infections, according to certain variables of the messages’ publicity and audience.
About one thousand adolescents
The authors assessed the impact of preventive advertising of HIV/AIDS in a sample of 913 adolescents, using the necessary instruments from the theories of persuasion and audiovisual communciation, as well as the psychological models of adoption of preventive and healthy conducts.
The goals of a first study of the research focused on the analysis of different preventive communication channels (TV, radio and written press) and their different effectiveness. They also studied the different impact of the messages according to the level of persuasion assessed by a group of 19 experts in the subject. The main results of this first study showed differencies in the impact according to the communication channel (this impact was slightly higher for TV channel among adolescents). In addition, they collected impact differencies according to the campaigns’ level of persuasion, in accordance with the classification carried out by the group of experts; usually, the higher level of persuasion considered by the experts achieved a higher impact among adolescents). As regards the variables in the audience, the results of a second study collected the importance of variables such as sex, the use of preservative, the control of impulses, stereotypes ad sex ideology to achieve a higher impact in the campaigns.
Juana María Bretón López highlights that the final aim of the study is to provide guidelines for the future preparation of successful campaigns with a higher persuasive impact. She also calls us on to reflect about the need of carrying out more assessment works on the effectiveness achieved by preventive interventions, together with the collaboration from Medicine, Public Health, Social Ciences or social and Community services which must offer the appropriate inter-disciplinary framework to deal with HIV/AIDS and its prevention.
Part of the results of this research work have been recently published in the journal Psicothema.
There are several images attached of the publications analysed. The first of them belongs to the campaign Preventing AIDS is up to you
Reference
Dr Juana María Bretón López. Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment of the University of Granada.
Tel.: 964729718.
E-mail.: breton@psb.uji.es
