Young Adults' Responses to Anti-smoking Messages
Condition: Smoking
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      The purpose of this study is to determine whether anti-smoking messages based on promising
      smoking-related beliefs increase anti-smoking intentions more than messages based on
      less-promising beliefs. Never smokers and former smokers will be randomly assigned to view
      different anti-smoking messages, and will answer questions measuring smoking-related beliefs,
      intentions, and message ratings online.
    

Detailed description: 
      The goal of the main study is to test the hypothesis that messages promoting promising
      smoking-related belief themes identified by the Hornik and Woolf (1999) method will increase
      anti-smoking intentions to a greater extent than less-promising belief themes. This
      hypothesis will be tested by exposing research participants to messages based on a range of
      belief themes and comparing their anti-smoking intentions across conditions. Using the method
      described by Hornik and Woolf (1999), promising and less-promising smoking-related beliefs
      are identified using cross-sectional survey data that examines the association between
      smoking-related beliefs and intentions. The research team has previously used this method to
      advise campaign developers as to which smoking-related beliefs they should target in
      anti-smoking campaigns, although our cross-sectional evidence was only suggestive because it
      could not tease apart the causal order of beliefs and intentions (i.e., do people with
      anti-smoking beliefs have intentions not to smoke, or do people who don't intend to smoke
      develop more anti-smoking beliefs). Because our evidence has been cross-sectional, it is
      currently unknown whether anti-smoking messages based on promising smoking-related beliefs
      are indeed more likely to increase intentions not to smoke. Therefore, there are two parts to
      the study that we will conduct experimentally. First, in the pilot study, we will pretest a
      larger set of themes than will be used in the main study to ensure that the themes we do use
      (whether promising or unpromising) are equally convincing. Otherwise, there may be a
      difference in intentions based on treatment group simply because the manipulation did not
      work in one group and did in another, not because holding promising beliefs is actually more
      effective at increasing intentions. Our claim is that if it were possible to convince people
      of both types of beliefs (promising and less-promising), they would be less likely to smoke
      in the promising case than in the less-promising case because those beliefs are more powerful
      at changing intentions. For the main study, we will therefore use a smaller set of themes and
      experimentally manipulate which respondents are exposed to promising smoking-related messages
      and which are exposed to less-promising smoking-related messages. We expect that the randomly
      assigned groups will endorse promising and less-promising smoking-related beliefs to
      different extents. This will allow us to test our hypothesis that promising beliefs are more
      effective at increasing anti-smoking intentions by examining differences in smoking-related
      intentions based on treatment group (exposure to either promising or less-promising
      messages).
    

Intervention name(s): Smoking-Related Messages
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Participant)
Primary purpose: Basic Science
Keywords: smoking-related messages; anti-smoking messages; smoking-related beliefs; anti-smoking intentions