Grant empowers Campaign Against Sexual Assault

 

 

 

PULLMAN – The United States Department of Education has awarded $235,000 to support an ongoing media campaign intended to empower students to prevent and respond appropriately to sexual violence at Washington State University.

 

Stacey Hust, assistant professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, and Paula M. Adams, Communication Coordinator at WSU’s Health and Wellness Services (HWS), will conduct field experiments during the next two years to explore the effectiveness of two communication strategies, social norms and entertainment education, in a media campaign to reduce sexual violence among WSU students.

 

Hust and Adams have collaborated on the project since 2006 when they were appointed by the WSU Office of the President to co-chair the Campus Campaign Against Sexual Assault.

 

Social norms is used to correct negative misperceptions of health behaviors and to promote the healthy behaviors that are the actual norm in a group. For example, the WSU posters used in the campaign highlight what WSU students do in certain situations. Students might not be aware of what is the real behavior of their peers, and campaigns using this strategy will inform the target audience.

 

The entertainment education strategy works by including health promotion messages in entertainment formats with messages that are equally entertaining and educational. The strategy is based on Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory and uses specific aspects of message construction to encourage viewers to model the healthy behavior shown in the entertainment program. It has been used successfully to change behavioral intentions about sexual health, family planning, and domestic violence, Adams said.

 

“Both the social norms approach and the entertainment education strategy have been used in health communication campaigns before. What makes our work unique is that we’re testing them in combination, and we’re applying them to a different issue, sexual violence,” Adams said.

 

“Our goal is to develop a better understanding of how to apply these theories effectively in media campaigns against sexual violence.”

 

Early versions of the campaign included posters, advertisements and press releases to target the entire campus population with an awareness campaign. Last year the campaign moved to posters and newsletters targeting freshmen, the group at highest risk for sexual violence. In the next two years, the campaign will consist of six sets of newsletters that will be direct mailed to approximately 2,400 undergraduate students, primarily freshmen.

 

 

Stacey Hust

“With the ongoing campaign, we have increased awareness among WSU students about services available for victims of sexual violence, but where we’d really like to get to is to have a media campaign that also generates behavior change,” Hust said. “Both theoretical approaches we are testing have the potential to change behavior, and our hypothesis is that they’ll be most effective when combined.”

 

The campaign has been broadly collaborative, including significant contributions from Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse and WSU Residence Life, and is a model for the future of health promotion activities at HWS, said Bruce Wright, Executive Director of HWS. This type of project delivers evidence based programming for the campus community while generating scholarship in the field and opportunities for extramural funding.

 

As the communication coordinator at HWS, Adams regularly contributes to health communication campaigns, including an award winning male body image awareness campaign. Hust is a core faculty member in the Consortium for the Study of Communication and Decision Making and researches how the mass media can be used to promote healthy living. The grant will also fund a research assistant, Chunbo “Richard” Ren, a doctoral student studying health communication.

 

Related Links:
Consortium for the Study of Communication and Decision Making: http://communication.wsu.edu/research/consortium/consortium.htm