In urban sub-Saharan Africa, leaders should appeal to voters of diverse ethnic backgrounds for electoral success. Yet, the political salience inequality demands their attention ethnicity issues in campaign messaging. This study examines impacts on voter preference appeals equality by using a conjoint experiment conducted Nairobi, Kenya. Appeals were varied randomly as follows: (1) no equality, ...

BACKGROUND Social media is gaining recognition as a platform for delivering public health messages. One area attracting attention from public health researchers and professionals is Facebook's advertising channel. This channel is reported to have a broad reach and generate high user engagement with the disseminated campaign materials. However, to date, no study has examined the communication pr...

A 35-month cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted in Burkina Faso to test whether a radio campaign focused on child health, broadcast between March 2012 and January 2015, could reduce under-5 mortality. This paper describes the design and implementation of the mass media intervention in detail, including the Saturation+ principles that underpinned the approach, the creative process, ...

We present a modified Deffuant-Weisbuch opinion dynamics model that integrates the influence of media campaigns on opinion. Media campaigns promote messages intended to inform and influence the opinions of the targeted audiences through factual and emotional appeals. Media campaigns take many forms: brand-specific advertisements, promotions, and sponsorships, political, religious, or social mes...

BACKGROUND Prior research supports the notion that parents have the ability to influence their children's decisions regarding sexual behavior. Yet parent-based approaches to curbing teen pregnancy and STDs have been relatively unexplored. The Parents Speak Up National Campaign (PSUNC) is a multimedia campaign that attempts to fill this void by targeting parents of teens to encourage parent-chil...

Over the past 5 years, spam sending technology has improved dramatically. Static messages sent opportunistically through misconfigured hosts have evolved into dynamically generated, subtly obfuscated messages sent on a massive scale by special purpose malware. We present a survey of three generations of the most popular spam sending tools, focusing on how they have improved over time. The paper...

OBJECTIVE This study assessed the recall of, reaction to, and understanding of a brief campus banner campaign promoting consent in sexual relationships, and determined whether campaign exposure was associated with subsequent engagement in activities related to sexual assault education, awareness, and prevention. PARTICIPANTS A stratified random sample of 1,200 undergraduates was recruited dur...

INTRODUCTION Zambia has high HIV prevalence and low voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) rates, heightening the need for effective VMMC demand generation strategies for HIV prevention. METHODS A 3-arm randomized controlled trial measured the impact of 2 short message service (SMS) campaigns on self-reported and verified VMMC uptake over 6 months in Lusaka Province. The study enrolled 23...