Deliverable D 1.3 RESULTS OF META-ANALYSIS ... - cast-eu.org

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Campaigns and awareness raising strategies in traffic safety — <strong>Deliverable</strong> D-1.1Firstly, mass-media methods have a clear advantage over personalcommunication in terms of audience reach.Secondly, the effects of mass media methods may be more telling in terms ofbroader social change over the long term, especially when they are employedcontinually in campaigns that form part of a road safety programme. The vastmajority of campaign evaluations in the CAST database do not measure thissort of social change but rather tend to deal with more immediate change,occurring either during or following soon after a campaign. In this sense it isimportant to distinguish between short-term change of an on-road behaviour –change well represented in the CAST database – and the longer term broaderchange of a society’s collective mindset. Notwithstanding psychometricdeficiencies in attitude measures in evaluation studies, the lack of evidencefor overall campaign effects on attitudes supports the idea that the evaluationstudies included in the CAST database are geared towards measuring a morea short term, possibly temporary, change in behaviour.Thirdly, there are some mass-media forms that do deliver campaignmessages in an immediate, if not intimate, way. Examples are in-car radiosand posters on the back of buses. Some would add on-road methods to thislist, as they consider these too to be a form of mass-media.A reasonable conclusion then is that national-level campaign designers moreconcerned with immediate, shorter term effects, should try to identify methodsthat have the potential to reach large audiences in a context relevant to targetbehaviour (immediacy), or supplement mass-media methods with moreimmediate or intimate delivery methods.The results support the use of enforcementWhen other factors are controlled for, our results indicate that the use ofmeasures to enforce the campaign message can lead to improved reductionsin accident counts (meta-regression results).The weaker effects of enforcement on campaign outcomes measured usingseatbelt usage rates is a little surprising, but may be partly explained by thepresence of a large number of small-scale seatbelt campaigns in the sample,which use ‘limited-area’ delivery methods that may be highly effective withoutthe need for accompanying enforcement measures. We should also bear inmind the broad definition of ‘campaigns’ used to gather material for our metaanalysisand realise that enforcement may still be important for achievingoptimal effectiveness of those seatbelt campaigns conducted on largerpopulations, in which mass media must be used to deliver the message. It isalso important to stress that no conclusions about how well enforcement canassist campaigns in reducing speeding, drink-driving or other behaviours canbe drawn from a disparate sample of seatbelt campaigns.To further explore differences between effects of enforcement according toCAST bivariate analyses and previous bivariate analyses, we conducted ameta-analysis using only those studies included in CAST originating from theGADGET project (Delhomme et al., 1999) and INFOEFFEKT projects (Vaa etal., 2004). As detailed in section 7.3, it is possible to describe an overall effectfor a large number of campaign effects using four possible methods. It isimportant to note that CAST uses a different method than GADGET. If one114
Campaigns and awareness raising strategies in traffic safety — <strong>Deliverable</strong> D-1.1compares the results from all four methods across the three groups of studiesused as the basis for GADGET, INFOEFFEKT and CAST, they are actuallystrikingly similar (Appendix A). The weaker effects of enforcement seen in theCAST bivariate analyses appear at least in part, then, to be due to thevagaries of the particular method used to derive an overall effect.In drawing conclusions about enforcement from CAST, it is also important toremember that we counted secondary enforcement activities as ‘enforcement’effects, and did not attempt to distinguish between different types ofenforcement activity.In summary, our results can not be used as evidence that enforcement, andespecially primary enforcement activities, do not improve the effects of mediacampaigns. On the contrary, they provide perhaps the strongest evidencefrom meta-analysis to date that enforcement improves accident reductionfigures when other factors are controlled for. Accompanying enforcement issuggested by a meta-regression model, in which a number of other influentialfactors are controlled for, as a factor enhancing campaign effects onaccidents. At the same time, our results also suggest that the effectiveness ofthose small scale campaign activities carried out in limited areas might beworth considering, where it is possible to carry out such activity.Humour (and fear) should not detract from the central messageThe beneficial effect of addressing risk of harm in a campaign fits somewhatwith the detrimental effect of the use of humour on outcome (according tomultivariate analysis). One inference that can be drawn is that unlesscampaigns are taken seriously, their messages will not be attended to. Anadditional possibility is that the use of humour in a campaign detracts attentionof the target group from the actual message. We suggest therefore thatcampaign planners intending to use humour should carefully check that itdoes reduce the likelihood that the central message is fully and seriouslyappreciated. Humour, like fear, may play a positive role in campaigns, but onlywhen other conditions of campaign effectiveness are not undermined by itsuse.Concerning fear, we were unable to find a sufficient number of studiesevaluating campaigns explicitly using fear to develop and test a ‘use of fear’variable. This was surprising given the high profile that fear campaigns seemto have, at least among researchers in the field. Conclusions about fearshould not be drawn directly from the ‘use of harm’ variable developed heresince addressing the use of harm does not necessarily invoke fear.Explore link between initial behaviour level and campaign outcomeThe testing of meta-regression models suggests that a main determinant ofcampaign effectiveness is the initial level of that safety outcome. Thisrelationship was clear and strong in the case of seatbelt use, where initial uselevels were also positively linked with the year of the campaign study. While alink is less certain where the outcome measure is accident counts, there issome evidence that more recent campaigns tend to have weaker effects onaccident outcomes. We would therefore like to suggest that, at least in thecase of seatbelt use, it is worth exploring the presence of a ceiling for115
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