An experimental investigation of the effect of advocacy adverstising by public and private sector: organizations on attitude change

In order to study the effect of advocacy advertising on attitude change, an Investigation was undertaken to test some findings in communication research. The early work of Carl Hovland and his associates provided the research areas in terms of source credibility. Implicit versus explicit conclusions, one versus two-sided messages, and primacy versus recency in the order of argument presentation. A major purpose of the investigation was to test hypotheses in the above aread with a new method for communication research. The new research approach was available through the work of Fishbein and Ajzen with respect to attitude theory. Their conceptual model is based on the idea that an individual's attitude toward an object, event, or thing is composed of a number of beliefs. In addition, each belief statement Includes a measure of belief strength and attribute evaluation. Personal interviews were conducted with twenty-three respondents to determine their, beliefs about public transportation, offshore drilling by U.S. oil companies, and government regulation of the oil Industry. The next step was the incorporation of the belief statements into messages representing advocacy advertisements. The advertisements were attributed to Consumer Reports, Mobil Oil Corporation, or the Federal Energy Administration. Using a before-and-after design, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of 192 subjects. The results of the experiment, in terms of specific hypotheses, were: (1) respondents judging the source to be of high credibility showed no more attitude change than those who judged the source to have low credibility; (2) neither the implicit nor explicit conclusion led to greater attitude change; (3) neither the one nor two-sided message caused a greater attitude shift; and (4) neither primacy nor recency order in argument presentation resulted in greater attitude change. Thus, all four of the study's hypotheses were rejected. Underlying factors influencing the lack of significant attitude change were identified as little change in the target and supportive beliefs. On further examination, the factors of source credibility, message comprehensicn, and belief strength or acceptance of source beliefs were found to be important influences also. The utilization of the Fishbein-Ajzen approach enabled the identification of the degree of acceptance of source beliefs, which is a factor that would not have been uncovered by the Hovland approach to communication research.