Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders The Evidence for Stigma Change (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Science of Communication
3 The Science of Communication
Pages 53-68
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From page 53... ...
BACKGROUND To change health-related public norms and behaviors, public health organizations often partner with communication scientists. The most effective and long lasting of these collaborative efforts have been based on communications science and informed by behavioral theory (Institute of Medicine, 2002)
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From page 54... ...
Communication efforts built on a foundation of behavioral theory will identify which public norms and behaviors to target, structure the message to be remembered so as to have lasting impact, and facilitate selection of the best message platform or source. The goal of stigma change efforts may be to reduce stigmatizing beliefs and behaviors or reinforce positive attitudes.
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From page 55... ...
There are many potential target audiences campaign designers might choose to focus on in a given campaign, and the examples provided here should not be considered comprehensive or exclusive. These examples are provided to guide campaign designers through the audience selection and message design processes and should not be used in place of formative research.
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From page 56... ...
Primary targets for stigma change campaigns include policy makers who have the ability to change laws that enable structural stigma against people with mental and substance use disorders; employers and landlords who have the power to deny livelihoods and housing to people with these disorders; mental health workers whose job is to provide nonjudgmental, culturally competent, evidence-based treatment; people with mental and substance use disorders who self-stigmatize in ways that reduce their quality of life; and the general public who can discriminate against or support and empower people with behavioral health disorders, notably through their support or opposition to policy, regulation, and legislation concerning people with mental and substance use disorders. In addition to being diverse, potential target audiences are sometimes difficult to define.
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. Potential target audiences and related goals and objectives for stigma change campaigns are discussed briefly below.
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From page 58... ...
. In an effort to counter misinformation that is online and bring accurate, nonstigmatizing messages to the forefront, behavioral health organizations can use advertisements and search- engine optimization strategies to bring accurate and professional health resources to the top of internet
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So, for example, since research indicates that the stereotype of dangerousness and unpredictability is prevalent among health professionals (Levey and Howells, 1994) , the objectives of an anti-stigma intervention for this audience would focus on improving mental health literacy about the relationships between violence and behavioral disorders, and increasing empathetic responses and decreasing aversive responses to people with mental or substance use disorders.
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. The goals of communication targeted toward media professionals would be to educate them about appropriate language to use to describe mental illness and substance use disorders, to increase their sensitivity when covering behavioral health issues in the news, and to produce more balanced and fact-based reporting of violent events that involve people with serious behavioral health problems.
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People are more receptive to sources that are similar to themselves, and to people who embody characteristics, such as likeability, expertise, and trustworthiness. Message sources for target audiences should be selected with these characteristics in mind, and evaluative research can help identify the best choices among alternatives.
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. To ensure that core ideas and information remain mentally available to the target audience, communications strategies need to include well-crafted narratives and/or exemplars that deliver strong arguments and provide information in a form that is engaging, comprehensible, and memorable or mentally "sticky." For example, if the goal is to understand the specifics about why landlords do not want to rent to people with mental illness, intervention planners might conduct formative research that shows it is because the landlords think tenants with mental illness will not pay their rent and will damage the apartment.
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From page 63... ...
When designing audio and video messages, producers can direct audience attention to focus on specific moments and specific contents by designing messages with structural features that elicit orienting responses. An orienting response is a set of physiological responses (i.e., turning one's sensory receptors toward the new event, decrease in heart 2 For more information about FactCheck.org, see http://www.factcheck.org/ [March 2016]
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Although it may seem straightforward to control audience attention through the structural features of a message, the limits of human cognitive processing ability force message producers to make decisions about how many and which features to use. Memory is always a tradeoff with increasing structural and content complexity -- when content is complex, there is a need to simplify structure, and when structure is complex, there is a need to simplify content.
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Motivationally relevant material increases memory for specific moments or things if the thing that is motivationally relevant is the thing you want remembered, and if the motivationally relevant thing is integrated with the information you want remembered rather than simply co-occurring (Sparks and Lang, 2014)
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. One final consideration for message producers is that pictures are more likely to shift implicit attitudes and words are more likely to affect thoughtful opinions or the viewer's explicit attitudes.
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From page 67... ...
. The list of potential communication channels below are examples and starting points for message producers to consider.
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