Understanding characteristics of youth willing to interact with a large-scale drug prevention media campaign

This presentation will examine profiles of youth who report that they are motivated to take action in regards to a large-scale national media campaign to prevent youth drug abuse. KDHRC evaluated an activity implemented by youth-serving, community-based organizations to raise awareness of positive and negative influences in youths' lives and foster skills for youth to avoid negative influences like drug use. The activity was conceptually linked with a large-scale media campaign that features advertising in traditional media (TV, print) and new media. The evaluation took the form of a pretest/post-test design where youth completed pretest surveys, attended three activity sessions, and completed post-test surveys. In total, 597 youth participated.

A bank of questions on the survey explored youths' awareness of the linked media campaign and their reported willingness to take action related to that campaign by obtaining, sharing, or creating additional information.

We hypothesize that youth who report increased willingness to take action related to the media campaign will fall into two major categories: consumers, defined as youth willing to seek out information created by the campaign, and producers, defined as youth willing to create and share new content created with campaign themes.

This presentation will explore our hypothesis and the demographic and psychosocial profiles of youth who fall into these major categories. A greater understanding of the characteristics of youth willing to interact with a media campaign will help program developers create more targeted and effective campaign content, therefore extendingthe reach and credibility of that information through word-of-mouth.