This paper will examine the influence of radio political campaign messages on the electorates’ voting behavior in Kano – Nigeria, with a focus on the 2015 general elections. It seeks to ascertain the extent that the electorates in Kano – Nigeria were exposed to radio political campaign messages, as well as the extent to which such messages influenced their voting decisions. Equally, the study c...

This report outlines an off-road trial of the effectiveness of Safety Campaign Messages (such as “Watch Your Speed”) sometimes displayed on Variable Message Signs (VMS) throughout the U.K.’s motorway network. Eighty drivers took part in the driving simulator study. It primarily investigated the effectiveness of the individual messages and how their presence affected driver behaviour towards mor...

Throughout history, the rights of stigmatized minority group members have been subject to popular debate and voter referenda. The impact of the resulting devaluing social discourse on the well-being of minority group members remains unknown. Most recently, exposure to the discourse leading up to decisions on same-sex marriage may have negative consequences for sexual minority individuals and sa...

The rapid adoption of social media by billions of people from all over the world has unleashed unprecedented opportunities for marketers and cognitive scientists to better understand why some message become popular while other die quickly. We designed a novel technique for automatically learning to differentiate popular tweets from unpopular ones and to predict how popular a given tweet will be...

BACKGROUND Accumulation of lifestyle physical activity is a current aim of health promotion, with increased stair climbing one public health target. While the workplace provides an opportunity for regular stair climbing, evidence for effectiveness of point-of-choice interventions is equivocal. This paper reports a new approach to worksite interventions, aimed at changing attitudes and, hence, b...

Does the issue content of campaign appeals mobilize particular subsets of voters? We examine whether issue content interacts with the interests and agendas of ‘‘issue publics,’’ focusing on the relationship between campaign messages and the turnout of senior citizens, veterans, and parents. Our analysis matches Current Population Survey respondents to media markets and then to relevant campaign...

Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns. Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the relationship between followers’ sentiment towards the campaign topic and their rate of retweeting of messages generated by the campaign. Our analysis with followers ...

The social norms approach predicts that campaign messages providing true normative information about widely misperceived health behaviors will reduce the gap between distorted perceptions versus actual practices and consequently reduce behaviors based on exaggerated norms. Formative evaluation of messages designed to effectively convey true norms informed by social judgment theory (SJT) should ...

BACKGROUND Binge drinking, commonly defined as having more than five drinks on a single occasion, is a public health issue affecting two thirds of Canadian young adults between the ages of 19-24 years. To educate young adults about alcohol poisoning, a network of 16 Ontario Health Units developed and implemented a mass-media campaign. The focus of this article is to report on post-secondary stu...