NCJ Number
86576
Date Published
1980
Length
33 pages
Annotation
This study describes overall characteristics of citizens most likely to attend to public service advertisements, including descriptions of their demographic, psycho-sociographic, media-related, and crime prevention-related attributes.
Abstract
The data were collected in personal interviews in September 1979 with adults residing in the Buffalo, Denver, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas. Multistage probability sampling techniques were used at each site, and the overall sample was 1,049, with respondents evenly distributed over the three locations. Public service advertisements were described to respondents as being those which differ from product-type ads in that they 'tell people about how they stay healthy, what they can do to help themselves, where they can go for help at social service agencies, and so forth...' Results indicate that public service advertisements (PSA's) do have an attentive audience which includes significant numbers of persons who believe them, find them helpful, and take certain kinds of actions as a result of having seen them. The makeup of this audience varies at least in part with the medium through which the ads are presented. Persons regularly using a particular medium were the most likely to attend to PSA's presented through it; however, demographic/socio-psychological factors and crime orientations to some extent discriminated among levels of PSA attendance within the audience of a medium; for example, women were more attentive to televised PSA's regardless of the extent of their exposure to television or their attention to product commercials. They also tended to find PSA's more helpful. Results also suggest that some of the focus on PSA's concerns crime and its prevention. Tabular data and 14 references are provided. (Author summary modified)