The Effectiveness of CDC’s Rx Awareness Campaigns on Reducing Opioid Stigma: Implications for Health Communication

ABSTRACT

Often health communication campaigns addressing misusing prescription opioids and opioid use disorder (OUD) do not pay enough attention to the associated stigma. This study investigated the effectiveness of a well-designed opioid awareness campaign on reducing stigma and provided evidence for future health communication design. CDC’s Rx Awareness videos were used as the experiment material. 137 college students participated in this online experiment, and audience characteristics and video features were considered and tested. The results showed that Rx Awareness videos significantly reduced participants’ stigmatizing attitudes and perceived public stigma and increased their empathy toward people with OUD. Empathy is a promising strategy to reduce opioid stigma. People with an opioid prescription history expressed more empathy. Recovery information, prescription history, and narrators’ race influenced the audience’s perceived public stigma. Implications for health communications and limitations of the study are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Box’s Test suggested accepting the equality of covariance of dependent variables across groups (p = .315) and Levene’s Test suggested accepting the equality of error variance of the dependent variables across groups (p = .332, .062, and .150, respectively). Unless notified otherwise, all following multivariate analyses passed these two tests as well.

2. Post stigmatization failed Levene’s Test of equality of error variance (p = .046), but since the two groups of this study had almost equal size (67 vs. 70), the impact of this slight violation could be considered minimal.

Additional information

Funding

This study did not receive any funding.The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, JY, upon reasonable request.