Framing Antismoking Message –
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they could differentiated whether the emphases of the messages were on the costs or
benefits of smoking or not.
Another limitation of this study is with the use of self-rating measures for affects. It
was observed that participants who were highly defensive even protected themselves
from revealing their emotions when filling out the questionnaires. This suggested more
consideration on covariates such as prior-experiment measures of perceived behavioral
control or self-efficacy and perceived threat when examining messages’ effects on affects
in the future studies.
One of the observations from the think aloud protocols was individuals would
possibly engage in thinking about the costs of smoking when presented with information
about the benefits of not smoking. Smoking has been strongly associated with its
negative health outcomes so when participants were presented with smoking-related
information, they easily thought of the potential losses, rather than gains; and when these
smokers were presented with the information, they quickly perceive the information
intent to deter them from smoking by telling them “reasons why smoking is bad.” Thus
future studies that aim to test effects of message framing can focus more on whether
framing of an outcome in a message can shift one’s reference on considering losses or
gains and whether such shift of reference changes one’s evaluation of outcomes, and
whether such changes will lead to changes in ones’ attitude toward the act and other
predicting variables in health behavior models.
In conclusion, this study suggests loss-framed messages in smoking cessation
campaigns can be effective for persuading young smokers, but messages should
emphasize on promoting self-efficacy and self-relevance of the issue. Findings on fear
Convention