The Impacts of Narrative Perspectives of Anti-Prescription Opioid Campaigns: The Mediating Roles of Identification, Perceived Severity, and Anticipated Guilt

ABSTRACT

An online experiment with two between-subjects conditions was conducted among a convenience sample of American college students to test the impact of first-person internally focalized versus third-person externally focalized risk narratives on the effectiveness of anti-prescription opioid campaigns as well as factors that explain such impact. It found that first-internal vs. third-external narratives increased identification with the character, perceived severity of the dangers of prescription opioids, anticipated guilt, as well as negative attitudes toward prescription opioids. The study also found indirect positive impacts of first-internal vs. third-external narratives on negative attitudes toward prescription opioids and intentions to avoid (mis)using prescription opioids via perceived severity and anticipated guilt but not identification. The findings contribute to our understanding of the impacts of narrative perspectives in the context of health communication and provide guidance in the design of effective anti-prescription opioid campaigns.

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Notes

1. Admittedly, the convenience sample recruited for this study slightly overrepresented White Americans and grossly overrepresented women, as 76% of Americans are White and 51% are women (The United States Census Bureau, 2021). The overrepresentation was partly due to the demographic profile of the geographic areas where the universities are located and the fact that women are more likely to major in communication than men (Borruto, 2015).

2. Before conducting indirect effect analyses, I tested the assumption of noncollinearity with narrative perspectives, all three proposed mediators and the control variables as the predictors of each of the outcome variables. The analysis found that the VIF values of the predictors ranged from 1.08 to 1.42 and their tolerance scores ranged from .71 to .93, which indicated no issue of multicollinearity (Cohen et al., 2003).

3. Given that the narratives used in this study varied in the negative consequences highlighted (death vs. becoming homeless), additional analysis was conducted to test the potential impacts of such variation. It found no significant main effects of the consequences or the interaction effects of narrative perspectives and the consequences on any of the mediators or outcome variables. Beyond this, the narratives used in this study varied in the gender of the character (with half of the characters being male and the other half female). Thus, additional analysis was also conducted to investigate whether gender match between characters and study participants had any impact on the mediators and outcome variables. The analysis found no significant main effects of the gender match or the interaction effects of narrative perspectives and the gender match on any of the mediators or outcome variables.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.