Changes in Social Representations Resulting from a Media Campaign

1
Changes in Social Representations Resulting from
a Media Campaign

• Mary Anne LAURIDepartment of Psychology
  University of Malta, MALTA. mary-anne.lauri_at_um.e
  du.mt
• and
• Josef LAURIDepartment of Mathematics University
  of Malta MALTA.

2
Introduction

• This paper addresses the problem of organ
  shortage in organ transplantation and discusses
  how his problem can be mitigated through public
  communication campaigns. Specifically it will
  discuss how the social representations which the
  public have of organ donors can be changed
  through a national campaign promoting organ
  donation.

3
Formative Research Before Campaign

• The findings presented in this paper are part of
  a wider research project on an organ donation
  campaign carried out in Malta (Lauri, 2001). The
  research carried out before the campaign involved
  the use of surveys, interviews, focus groups and
  analysis of the media. The research reported here
  analyses part of the data collected through focus
  groups.

4
Formative Research Before Campaign

• The two main aims of the campaign were to
  increase the level of knowledge on organ donation
  and to encourage people to carry the donor card
  thereby pledging their organs after their death.
  Great emphasis was directed at the perceptions
  which people had of organ donors because research
  had shown that positive perceptions of organ
  donors and organ donation were the best
  precursors of people becoming organ donors.

5
The Campaign

• The campaign made use of all important media
  channels available at the time in Malta. In
  particular, the campaign team made use of
• Print Media
• Radio
• Television
• Direct advertising as well as Public Relations
  were used.

6
The Print Media

• The initial phase of the campaign targeted the
  print media. Public service announcements
  promoting the campaign appeared on all
  newspapers. These included a form which the
  public could use to request information, a
  picture of a donor card, and a form to register
  ones name in the National Organ Donor Register.
  Newspapers featured press releases, interviews
  with people who had donated organs and also with
  those who had received organs.

7
Radio

• During the third week of the campaign, radio was
  included. Radio is the ideal medium for instant
  feedback. People could phone during programmes on
  organ donation aired on different radio stations
  to ask questions and get immediate answers. The
  radio campaign was strengthened by three
  40-second public service announcements made by
  well-known Maltese public personalities.

8
Television

• Use of television started in the fourth week of
  the campaign. Advertising during prime time was
  used to give the widest possible coverage to the
  campaigns messages. The television advert
  depicted a typical Maltese family discussing
  organ donation during dinner. The family
  environment was used to emphasise that organ
  donation should be a family decision. The leading
  role was performed by a television personality
  who anchored a popular weekly television
  programme.

9
Public Relations

• Besides the adverts, many presenters of popular
  discussion programmes, both on radio and
  television, accepted to discuss the topic of
  organ donation in their programmes. This put the
  topic on the public agenda. This phenomenon was
  further reinforced with the coverage of all media
  events related to organ donation on the major
  news bulletins seen by a big number of Maltese
  viewers.

10
Indicators of the Success of the Campaign

• There were many indicators of the success of the
  organ donation campaign. The number of people who
  carried a donor card went up from 9 of the
  population before the campaign to 17 after the
  campaign.
• The number of kidney transplantations
  performed in the year following the campaign went
  up from 4 in the year before the campaign to 14
  in the year after the campaign

11
Other Indicators

• There were other indicators of the success of
  the campaign. In this paper we will only discuss
  the changes in social representations which took
  place amongst the focus group participants.
• Since this study was not experimental, it is
  difficult to say that the changes registered in
  the social representations towards organ donors
  were the result of the campaign. We can only
  claim that the campaign was probably one of the
  main instigators of the changes in social
  representations of organ donors.

12
Studying Social Representations

• Breakwell and Canter (1993) have argued that
  virtually every method known to social science
  has been used at some point in order to study
  social representations.
• Ethnographic studies (e.g. Jodolet, 1991)
• Experiments (eg. Abric, 1984)
• Questionnaires (eg. Agostinos, 1990)
• Interviews (eg. Molinari and Emiliani, 1990)
• Focus groups (eg. Jovchelovitch and Gervais,
  1999)
• Free associations (e.g., Di Giacomo, 1980)

13
Studying Social Representations

• Moreover, different researchers have used
  different tools to analyse the data. For example,
• Multidimensional scaling (eg. Uzzell and Blud,
  1993)
• Correspondence analysis (eg. Hammond, 1993)
• Cluster analysis (eg. Fife-Shaw, 1993)
• Discriminant analysis (eg. Zani, 1993)

14
MethodologyFocus Groups

• In the part of the study being reported on in
  this presentation, focus groups were used to find
  out the participants views of organ donation,
  organ donors and non-donors. Focus groups are an
  ideal tool to collect data when the purpose of
  the research is to elicit peoples own
  understandings, opinions, views and how these are
  elaborated and negotiated in a social context.

15
Sampling Procedure

• Participants were recruited from different towns
  and villages from all over the island to avoid
  possible biases of particular communities. This
  was done by approaching people in supermarkets,
  asking them whether they were willing to take
  part in a discussion on organ donation as part of
  a research project. Those who accepted were
  invited to give the names of friends who they
  thought would be willing to accompany them for
  the discussion.

16
Participants

• A letter was sent to 57 prospective participants
  giving them more information about the project
  and also the time and place of the focus group.
  The people were again reminded of the discussion,
  by telephone, one day before the focus group.
  Sixteen persons dropped out.
• Each of the five groups was made up of eight
  people on average. They were evenly distributed
  between women and men, and between young and
  middle-aged people with different levels of
  education.

17
Procedure

• Participants were asked to discuss their views
  on organ donation, that is, whether they agreed
  or disagreed with the issue and the reasons why
  they agreed or disagreed. In the last part of the
  discussion they were also asked to talk about the
  type of persons who, in their opinion, were
  willing to donate organs after their death and
  the type of persons who were not. This was done
  through the use of photos with the aim of
  eliciting the perceptions which participants had
  of donors and non-donors.

18
Photolanguage

• Using photographs at the end of a group
  discussion instead of keywords, like in other
  studies (e.g., Di Giacomo, 1980), had two added
  advantages.
• It made it easier for participants to assign
  freely, personality traits to donors and
  non-donors.
• The reasons given for choosing particular
  photographs would have been influenced by both
  personal and group beliefs aired in the focus
  groups. This interplay between personal beliefs
  and the beliefs of the group, mirrors the process
  that happens in everyday life in a community.

19
Materials

• The photos depicted people of all ages, coming
  from different socio-economic backgrounds and
  depicting different lifestyles. For example,
  photos showed an older person working in the
  fields, an airline pilot, a young person playing
  the guitar, a woman with a child and a family
  around a dinner table. A few of the photos were
  of Maltese media personalities and public
  persons.

20
Aims of Using Photos

• Participants were asked to choose a photograph
  of persons who, they thought, would typically
  donate their organs and of those who would not.
  The aims of the exercise were two.
• The first aim was to find out what traits
  people attributed to organ donors and non-donors.
  These trait descriptions revealed the
  characteristics which were associated with organ
  donors and non-donors.
• The second aim was to find out whether these
  traits changed as a result of a campaign.

21
Perceptions Before and After the Campaign

• The views of the participants were examined at
  two points, once before the launching of the
  campaign and once again, two months after the end
  of the campaign. The aim of this exercise was to
  see if there were any changes in the perceptions
  of the participants as a result of the campaign.
• Of course a change in perceptions is often
  the result of a number of factors and the
  observed changes could not be solely attributed
  to the effect of the campaign.

22
Results

• For each photo chosen, the participants were
  asked to give reasons for their choice. The
  reasons given described traits which,
  participants perceived, donor would have.
• The basic units of analysis which were recorded
  from this exercise were the traits which
  participants projected onto the person in the
  photo they had chosen. Each unit will be referred
  to as an utterance. A single participant could
  have produced more than one utterance.

23
Results (cont.)

• This textual data was elaborated as follows.
  Each utterance was classified on two variables.
  The first variable DONOR classified (i) whether
  the utterance was intended to describe a likely
  donor or non-donor and (ii) whether it was used
  in a focus group before or after the campaign.
  This variable DONOR therefore had four levels
  Yes before, Yes after, No before, No after.

24
Results (cont.)

• The second variable DESCRIPTION classified the
  reason expressed by the participant for choosing
  the photograph. In the first phase of the
  analysis, all the different traits attributed to
  donors or non-donors referred to by these
  utterances were analysed and synonyms were
  grouped together under one label. As a result, 35
  different traits were identified. These traits,
  for example old, kind and happy were the
  levels of the variable DESCRIPTION.

25
Coding Reliability

• To test for coding reliability, a second coder
  was given the transcript from which the
  utterances were extracted and asked to classify
  them according to the 35 traits which had been
  identified in the first phase. The
  classifications carried out by the second coder
  matched with the first coding for 91 of the
  utterances.

26
Analysis of Data

• Traits which were mentioned only once were
  discarded. This was done to eliminate one-off
  descriptions which did not represent shared
  ideas. This left 215 different utterances
  classified into 27 traits, which therefore became
  the levels of the variable DESCRIPTION. A
  contingency table showing the distribution of
  these utterances amongst the 27 traits and the
  four donor/non-donor levels is shown in Table 1.

27
Contingency Table for Variables Donor by
Description

28
Correspondence Analysis

• A correspondence analysis was then performed on
  the data.
• The aim of correspondence analysis is to help
  show visually the relationships between the
  levels in a contingency table.
• Correspondence analysis is a very appropriate
  tool within the context of this investigation of
  social representations because it is designed as
  an aid to interpretation and the
  researcher is never far from her own data.
  (Hammond, 1993)

29
Correspondence Analysis (cont.)

• In correspondence analysis, the different levels
  of the two categorical variables are given scores
  on one or more dimensions. This is done in such a
  way that levels that are more alike will get
  similar scores. Therefore if the scores are then
  plotted as graphs, levels that are alike appear
  close to each other whereas levels that are
  dissimilar appear far apart.

30
Correspondence Analysis (cont.)

• The ANACOR procedure in SPSS was used to carry
  out the correspondence analysis on the above
  contingency table. Four normalisation methods are
  provided by ANACOR. Canonical normalisation was
  chosen since the aim here was to analyse the
  similarities between the levels of DONOR and also
  between the levels of DESCRIPTION.

31
Correspondence Analysis Dimension 1 by
Dimension 2

32
A one-dimensional representation

• To focus attention on representations of organ
  donors, a second analysis of the data was
  performed using only the utterances describing
  donors. Therefore the levels of the variable
  DONOR became two Yes before and Yes after.
  There were now 107 utterances, corresponding to
  21 different levels of the variable DESCRIPTION.
  A contingency table showing the distribution of
  these utterances amongst the 21 traits and the
  two donor levels is shown in Table 2.

33
Contingency Table for Variables Donors by
Description for utterances describing donors
34
A One-dimensional Representation
35
Analysis of Results

• Analysing the results of Figure 1 and Figure 2,
  it is clear that before the campaign, donors were
  generally perceived to be young persons, people
  who care about others, who practise a sport, who
  love and appreciate life, and who are
  pro-environment. Public figures were very often
  chosen and perceived to be donors.

36
Analysis of Results

• In the post-campaign focus groups, donors were
  perceived to be ordinary people manual workers
  and persons who have a family. They were also
  seen to be educated, analytic, happy, kind,
  modern and well-informed, who are generous and
  who are religious.

37
Conclusion

• Before the campaign, donors were associated with
  particular categories of people public figures,
  young and sportive persons, professionals and
  people with good jobs. After the campaign it
  seems that donors were more readily perceived to
  be the ordinary person, a member of a family, and
  therefore possibly oneself.