UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (November 6, 2006) – A new research report from Penn
State's Smeal College of Business finds that modest in-school lessons
revealing the goals and effects of alcohol advertising can reduce the
likelihood that adolescents will drink.
Dozens of research studies done over the past 20 years have found a
correlation between alcohol advertising and underage drinking.
To counter the effectiveness of those ads, a team of researchers led by
Smeal's Marvin E. Goldberg, Irving and Irene Bard Professor of Business
Administration, designed a weeklong intervention to educate children about
the persuasive tactics used by advertisers. Teachers presented the lessons
to students in 50-minute sessions once a day for five days.
The instruction provided students with persuasion knowledge and equipped
them with critical thinking skills and processing strategies to question
alcohol advertising and better deal with the ads' persuasive messages,
ultimately reducing the children's inclination to drink.
"Our basic premise was that getting youths to better understand
advertisers' motives and tactics would result in heightened vigilance and a
reactance response," Goldberg and his colleagues write.
They found that the students who learned about advertising strategy and
critical thinking, particularly those who had previously consumed alcohol,
expressed more critical attitudes toward alcohol advertising and stronger
intentions not to drink in the future.
According to Goldberg, the relative simplicity of the instruction makes
this kind of program viable. Past alcohol and drug programs in schools have
been canceled or phased out because of their expense, time consumption, or
lack of results. An actual program like this one, in which teachers
administer the short lessons, taking up little class time, could be feasible
and produce results.
A total of 414 sixth-grade students from 15 separate classrooms
participated in the study, consisting of the five lessons and a confidential
questionnaire about alcohol use and attitudes administered two hours after
the last lesson for one group and one week later for another group. A
control group did not receive the instruction, but still filled out the
survey.
"Heightening Adolescent Vigilance towards Alcohol Advertising to
Forestall Alcohol Use," will be published in this month's edition of the
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. Co-authors with Goldberg on the report
are Keith E. Niedermeier of The Wharton School, Lori J. Bechtel of Penn
State, and Gerald J. Gorn of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Goldberg is the Irving & Irene Bard Professor of Business Administration
at Smeal, where much of his research has focused on the study of
advertising's effects on children and adolescents. He has master's degree in
sociology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in marketing from the
University of Illinois.
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REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the eBusiness Research Center, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
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