A social psychological approach to the construction and evaluation of audio-taped health-related communications : source and message variables explored

In an effort to explore the influence of source and complexity on adolescents' memory and feeling for health- related information, a project was conducted following a framework established by Solomon and Maccoby (1984) for targeting, designing and evaluating the success of community health communications. Specifically, an adolescent health-related cassette library system (CLS) -- consisting of seven topics rated as most important from a community needs assessment -- was developed in prototypic form. Also developed were several instruments useful for constructing health-related communications (viz., a structural and persuasive format, and a theoretical content analysis system). Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of Source Similarity and Complexity on information recall and satisfaction. Experiment 2 focussed on source-mediated cues and their effects on satisfaction and source perception. Both experiments were fully crossed, within-subjects designs, using 77 subjects from the Hitchcock Independent School District.