Public health campaigns to reduce risks associated with indoor air pollution: The canary in the American home

Issues: Americans spend nearly 90 percent of any given day indoors where concentrations of many pollutants exceed outdoor levels, making indoor air quality a critical public health issue. As the green building movement gains momentum and homes continue to age, public health practitioners have developed communication campaigns to increase awareness of two widespread indoor air pollutants: radon gas and lead.

Description: This paper critiques an assortment of existing evaluations of radon and lead interventions (i.e., field experiments, cross-sectional surveys, and longitudinal observational studies) using several important criteria for establishing effects, including research design and analysis.

Lessons Learned: Indoor air pollution communication campaigns remain popular among practitioners; however, formal summative evaluations in this sector, especially of mass media interventions, are scarce. Of note, available studies reviewed in this paper failed to capture the underlying causal mechanism linking information exposure and risk-reducting intentions or behaviors.

Recommendations: The field of environmental health communication would benefit from adopting a more consistent evaluative approach that allows for stronger conclusions to be drawn about campaign effects. Despite the short-term gains of forgoing in-depth planning and assessment (e.g., expediency), the long-term consequences of abstaining from summative evaluation may undermine campaign efficacy. Developing a clear logic model, measuring exposure, and determining whether the intended effects were achieved are key to justifying and improving future environmental health campaigns.