Message fatigue: Conceptual definition, operationalization, and correlates

ABSTRACT

Despite growing concern over the public’s fatigue toward inundated health messages, communication research has largely neglected such ramifications of prolonged, real-life campaign exposure. This paper offers an initial conceptual and empirical treatment of message fatigue, an important, but understudied, side effect of campaigns. Specifically, it proposes conceptual and operational definitions of the construct and examines psychometric characteristics of a proposed message fatigue scale. The findings from two studies concerning safe sex (N = 412) and anti-obesity messages (N = 396) demonstrated solid support for the scale’s unidimensionality. In support of construct validity, the scale exhibited significant associations with message avoidance, annoyance, information seeking, and desensitization. Moreover, in an experimental setting in Study 2, message fatigue negatively predicted attention and message elaboration, while positively predicting counterargument.

KEYWORDS:

• Message fatigue
• health campaigns
• message avoidance
• information seeking
• desensitization
• counterargument
• scale validation

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Drs Lijiang Shen, Lucy Popova, and Hyunyi Cho for their helpful comments on the manuscript and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1. Bornstein’s (1989) meta-analysis concerned studies that employed persuasive effects (e.g., affect or attitude toward the stimuli) as the outcome variable. Note that the observed inverted U-shape relationship between message exposure frequency and (persuasive) outcome may not apply to other types of outcomes such as familiarity or brand recognition (for example, see Jeong et al., 2012 for the difference in the exposure effects on brand recognition and advertising liking).

2. Note that the term “burnout” used in the extant message fatigue literature has a rather colloquial meaning, especially in comparison to the definition of “burnout” used in the job burnout literature, which defines (job) burnout as “a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors” (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001, p. 397).

3. Message fatigue should be carefully distinguished from other types of unintended effects of health messages that may seem similar, such as information overload. Information overload refers to a state in which an individual is overwhelmed by the amount of relevant information available to them (Bawden & Robinson, 2009; Jensen et al., 2014). Message fatigue and information overload are similar in that both are caused by excessive exposure to information and messages in the environment. However, the key difference is that message fatigue concerns excessive exposure to similar messages over time, whereas information overload is often generated by exposure to overwhelming amount of different, diverse, or contradicting information (Eppler & Mengis, 2004). The latter type of information environment hampers one’s ability to select the most useful information (Bawden & Robinson, 2009), as opposed to making one bored and worn-out via repetition and/or overexposure.

4. We tested this speculation by conducting an additional analysis correcting for attenuation due to measurement error guided by Spearman (1904). Confidence intervals around the corrected correlations were estimated by applying Charles (2005) approach. The corrected correlation between overexposure and information seeking improved from −.12 to −.16, 95% CI [−.28, −.04], thus providing empirical evidence that the lack of significant correlation likely have been due to low reliability of the overexposure dimension in Study 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Georgia Research Foundation [grant number 2964].