Preventing Domestic Violence in the African American Community: Assessing the Impact of a Dramatic Radio Serial

Abstract

This article reports on the evaluation of “It's Your Business,” a dramatic radio serial promoting domestic violence prevention in the African-American community that was made available for national broadcast. Radio stations in 4 study cities committed to airing the broadcasts. However, in only 1 of the 4 was the broadcast carried out in even a limited way. Consequently, only data from one city could be used to assess impact. Even there only 9 percent of the sample could confidently be called exposed, answering a recall question correctly and claiming to hear more than 2 episodes. These moderately exposed respondents scored higher than non-exposed respondents on 21 out of 27 anti-domestic violence beliefs and behaviors; 10 differences were statistically significant. However, the moderate exposure group only displayed stronger outcomes than a group who claimed exposure but could not recall much about the program in 2 out of the 27 outcomes at a statistically significant level. We conclude that the association of moderate exposure and anti-domestic violence outcomes was most likely an artifact of selective perception, and not a result of exposure alone. The evaluation points to the need to better understand how exposure can be achieved to complement our work on developing messages.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 50^th International Communication Association annual conference, Acapulco, Mexico, May 2000.

Notes

¹The website for the FVPF (www.fvpf.org) describes their mission and current activities.

²At the same time, The Advertising Council (1999) reported a 25% increase from 1997 to 1998 in donated radio time for their campaigns, to a total of over $700 million. Radio alone made up almost 60% of total media support to The Advertising Council totaling $1.2 billion in 1998 alone.

Notes: 1. NE = not exposed, ME = moderately exposed, and AE = ambiguously exposed. 2. Belief measures measured on a five point scale, where 1 = Strongly Agree and 5 = Strongly Disagree. Intention and behavior measures were dichotomous. Results in this table are uniformly presented so that higher numbers indicate a response consistent with program goals.