On the Conceptual Ambiguity Surrounding Perceived Message Effectiveness

Abstract

Health message quality is best understood in terms of a message’s ability to effectively produce change in the variables that it was designed to change. The importance of determining a message’s effectiveness in producing change prior to implementation is clear: The better a message’s potential effectiveness is understood, the better able interventionists are to distinguish effective from ineffective messages before allocating scarce resources to message implementation. For this purpose, research has relied on perceived message effectiveness measures as a proxy of a message’s potential effectiveness. Remarkably, however, very little conceptual work has been done on perceived message effectiveness, which renders its measures underinformed and inconsistent across studies. To encourage greater conceptual work on this important construct, we review several threats to the validity of existing measures and consider strategies for improving our understanding of perceived message effectiveness.

Notes

¹ Support for this possibility could be drawn from data on participants’ perceptions of the harmfulness of the substances themselves (and not just perceptions of the messages about these substances). Unfortunately, these data do not exist in pertinent studies or at least are not published alongside PE ratings (Fishbein et al., 2002; Yzer et al., 2011).

² Some research questions, such as work on third-person effects or work on social networks of at-risk individuals, require PE measure anchors other than oneself, e.g., the perceived effectiveness of a treatment regimen adherence message for a close other. Most PE work, however, centers on perceived message effects on oneself, which means that the message recipient is an essential (but not necessarily the only) anchor.