Dataset Information

Fear Appeals in Anti-Knife Carrying Campaigns: Successful or Counter-Productive?

ABSTRACT: In the UK, knife crime continues to be a persistent and worrying concern. Media campaigns are often used by police and anti-knife crime organisations in an attempt to discourage young people from picking up a weapon. Many focus on the potentially devastating consequences associated with carrying a weapon, with the aim of provoking fear and thus a deterrent effect. In this paper, we present the findings from two experimental studies exploring the effects of exposure to fear-based knife crime media campaigns on young people's intentions to engage in knife-carrying behaviour. Utilising a terror management theory perspective, in both studies we found that exposure to knife-related campaign imagery increased mortality salience, but there was no effect of campaign condition on willingness to carry a knife or on perceived benefits of knife-carrying. Although knife-related self-esteem/cultural worldviews predicted attitudes towards knife-carrying, such views did not moderate the effect of exposure to knife-related campaign imagery, and there was no effect of priming participants' to consider the value of behaving responsibly. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

SUBMITTER: Hobson Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9679559 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Fear Appeals in Anti-Knife Carrying Campaigns: Successful or Counter-Productive?

Hobson Zoë Z Yesberg Julia A JA Bradford Ben B

Journal of interpersonal violence 20220117 23-24

In the UK, knife crime continues to be a persistent and worrying concern. Media campaigns are often used by police and anti-knife crime organisations in an attempt to discourage young people from picking up a weapon. Many focus on the potentially devastating consequences associated with carrying a weapon, with the aim of provoking fear and thus a deterrent effect. In this paper, we present the findings from two experimental studies exploring the effects of exposure to fear-based knife crime medi ...[more]

PMID: 35038941

Similar Datasets

Project description:There has been growing recognition of the popularity of medical crowdfunding and research documenting how crowdfunding arises from, and contributes to, social and health inequities. While many researchers have surmised that racism could well play a role in medical crowdfunding campaign outcomes, research on these dynamics has been limited. No research to date has examined these dynamics among the most successful medical crowdfunding campaigns, focusing instead on average users' experiences or specific patient subpopulations. This paper analyzes key characteristics and demographics of the 827 most successful medical crowdfunding campaigns captured at a point in time in 2020 on the popular site GoFundMe, creating the first demographic archetype of "viral" or highly successful campaigns. We hypothesized that this sample would skew towards whiter, younger populations, more heavily represent men, and reflect critical illnesses and accidents affecting these populations, in addition to having visually appealing, well-crafted storytelling. Analysis supported these hypotheses, showing significant levels of racial and gender disparities among campaigners. While white men had the greatest representation, Black and Asian users, and black women in particular, were highly underrepresented. Like other studies, we find evidence that racial and gender disparities persist in terms of campaign outcomes as well. Alongside this quantitative analysis, a targeted discourse analysis revealed campaign narratives and comments reinforced racist and sexist tropes of selective deservingness. These findings add to growing calls for more health research into the ways that social media technologies shape health inequities for historically marginalized and disenfranchised populations. In particular, we underscore how successful crowdfunding campaigns, as a both a means of raising funds for health and a broader site of public engagement, may deepen and normalize gendered and racialized inequities. In this way, crowdfunding can be seen as a significant technological amplifier of the fundamental social causes of health disparities.

Project description:BackgroundSerious games for the training of prevention behaviors have been widely recognized as potentially valuable tools for adolescents and young adults across a variety of risk behaviors. However, the role of agency as a distinguishing factor from traditional health interventions has seldom been isolated and grounded in the persuasive health communication theory. Fear appeals have different effects on intentions to perform prevention behaviors depending on the immediacy of the consequences. Looking into how to increase self-efficacy beliefs for health behavior with distant consequences is the first step toward improving game-based interventions for adverse health outcomes.ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the effect of agency on self-efficacy and the intention to drink less alcohol in an interactive digital narrative fear appeal. Furthermore, the communicated immediacy of threat outcomes was evaluated as a potential moderator of the effect of agency on self-efficacy.MethodsA web-based experimental study was conducted with university students (N=178). The participants were presented with a fear appeal outlining the consequences of excessive alcohol use in a fully automated web-based interactive narrative. Participants either had perceived control over the outcome of the narrative scenario (high agency) or no control over the outcome (low agency). The threat was either framed as a short-term (high immediacy) or long-term (low immediacy) negative health outcome resulting from the execution of the risk behavior (drinking too much alcohol).ResultsA total of 123 valid cases were analyzed. Self-efficacy and intention to limit alcohol intake were not influenced by the agency manipulation. Self-efficacy was shown to be a significant predictor of behavioral intention. The immediacy of the threat did not moderate the relationship between agency and self-efficacy.ConclusionsAlthough agency manipulation was successful, we could not find evidence of an effect of agency or threat immediacy on self-efficacy. The implications for different operationalizations of different agency concepts, as well as the malleability of self-efficacy beliefs for long-term threats, are discussed. The use of repeated versus single interventions and different threat types (eg, health and social threats) should be tested empirically to establish a way forward for diversifying intervention approaches.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT05321238; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05321238.

Dataset Information

Fear Appeals in Anti-Knife Carrying Campaigns: Successful or Counter-Productive?

Publications

Fear Appeals in Anti-Knife Carrying Campaigns: Successful or Counter-Productive?

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets