An investigation into the influence that social and physical anti-smoking threat appeals have upon adolescent behavioural responses

The application of social marketing is rising due to its ability to promote behavioural change. This has catalysed the implementation of threat appeals across the health domain. The prominence of including physical threats that aim to elicit a fearful response has prevailed throughout threat appeal research. This over reliance and limited research has provided an opportunity to explore how other content influence attitudes and intentions towards behaviour. To the best of my knowledge, no research has systematically compared the differences between adolescents’ responses to social and physical threat appeals, specifically with those aged 11-13 who are the most vulnerable to starting to smoke. With theory suggesting that preventing adolescent smoking initiation holds the greatest reward; a conceptual model has been developed to evaluate how coping response is elicited to threat appeals. The model provides an interesting theoretical approach to evaluate responses that aim to reduce adolescent smoking initiation. Identified as one of the greatest failures in public health, marketing has been recommended to conquer adolescent initiation. The thesis provides innovative results, comparing responses between smoking classifications that provides practical findings. Attitudinal and intentional responses towards smoking was shown to be significantly different between samples depending on threat witnessed, thus identifying the need to segment campaigns. The development of the coping response classification provides a tool to assess whether the observer accepts the threat or disregards it. Specifically the research addresses three areas: 1) To investigate the differences between adolescent non-smokers’ and smokers’ responses to threat appeals; 2) To compare how social threats and physical threats influence post exposure responses; and 3) To develop a coping response classification to evaluate and estimate attitudinal and intentional responses between samples for each threat appeal to better understand responses to social marketing campaigns.