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

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Campaigns and awareness raising strategies in traffic safety — Deliverable D 1.3difficult to carry out on a larger scale (e.g. rewards, pledge cards) are particularlyeffective and therefore worth considering.Targets receive campaign messages delivered by television or newspapers in waysthat are often removed in space and time from the actual (on-road) target behaviour.These targets would also often be in a situation in which it is easy to ‘switch off’ orignore the campaign message. Despite this, we recommend that campaigndesigners continue to consider mass-media for the following reasons:Firstly, mass-media methods have a clear advantage over personal communicationin 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 this sort ofsocial change but rather tend to deal with more immediate change, occurring eitherduring or following soon after a campaign. In this sense it is important to distinguishbetween short-term change of an on-road behaviour – change well represented inthe CAST database – and the longer term broader change of a society’s collectivemindset. Notwithstanding psychometric deficiencies in attitude measures inevaluation studies, the lack of evidence for overall campaign effects on attitudessupports the idea that the evaluation studies included in the CAST database aregeared towards measuring a more short term, possibly temporary, change inbehaviour.Thirdly, there are some mass-media forms that do deliver campaign messages in animmediate, if not intimate, way. Examples are in-car radios and posters on the backof buses. Some would add on-road methods to this list, as they consider these too tobe 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 methods thathave the potential to reach large audiences in a context relevant to target behaviour(immediacy), or supplement mass-media methods with more immediate or intimatedelivery methods.The results support the use of enforcementWhen other factors are controlled for, our results indicate that the use of measures toenforce the campaign message can lead to improved reductions in accident counts(meta-regression results).The weaker effects of enforcement on campaign outcomes measured using seatbeltusage rates is a little surprising, but may be partly explained by the presence of alarge number of small-scale seatbelt campaigns in the sample, which use ‘limitedarea’delivery methods that may be highly effective without the need foraccompanying enforcement measures. We should also bear in mind the broaddefinition of ‘campaigns’ used to gather material for our meta-analysis and realisethat enforcement may still be important for achieving optimal effectiveness of thoseseatbelt campaigns conducted on larger populations, in which mass media must beused to deliver the message. It is also important to stress that no conclusions about8
Campaigns and awareness raising strategies in traffic safety — Deliverable D 1.3how well enforcement can assist campaigns in reducing speeding, drink-driving orother behaviours can be drawn from a disparate sample of seatbelt campaigns.To further explore differences between effects of enforcement according to CASTbivariate analyses and previous bivariate analyses, we conducted a meta-analysisusing only those studies included in CAST originating from the GADGET project(Delhomme et al., 1999) and INFOEFFEKT projects (Vaa et al., 2004). As detailed insection 7.3, it is possible to describe an overall effect for a large number of campaigneffects using four possible methods. It is important to note that CAST uses a differentmethod than GADGET. If one compares the results from all four methods across thethree groups of studies used as the basis for GADGET, INFOEFFEKT and CAST,they are actually strikingly similar (Appendix A). The weaker effects of enforcementseen in the CAST 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 of enforcementactivity.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 evidence frommeta-analysis to date that enforcement improves accident reduction figures whenother factors are controlled for. Accompanying enforcement is suggested by a metaregressionmodel, in which a number of other influential factors are controlled for, asa factor enhancing campaign effects on accidents. At the same time, our results alsosuggest that the effectiveness of those small scale campaign activities carried out inlimited areas might be worth considering, where it is possible to carry out suchactivity.Humour (and fear) should not detract from the central messageThe beneficial effect of addressing risk of harm in a campaign fits somewhat with thedetrimental effect of the use of humour on outcome (according to multivariateanalysis). One inference that can be drawn is that unless campaigns are takenseriously, their messages will not be attended to. An additional possibility is that theuse of humour in a campaign detracts attention of the target group from the actualmessage. We suggest therefore that campaign planners intending to use humourshould carefully check that it does reduce the likelihood that the central message isfully and seriously appreciated. Humour, like fear, may play a positive role incampaigns, but only when other conditions of campaign effectiveness are notundermined by its use.Concerning fear, we were unable to find a sufficient number of studies evaluatingcampaigns explicitly using fear to develop and test a ‘use of fear’ variable. This wassurprising given the high profile that fear campaigns seem to have, at least amongresearchers in the field. Conclusions about fear should not be drawn directly from the‘use of harm’ variable developed here since addressing the use of harm does notnecessarily invoke fear.9
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