Mass Media, Ideation, and Behavior

Abstract

To estimate the impact of a mass media campaign to promote contraceptive use, a national longitudinal sample survey was conducted in September 1995 and March 1996. Recall of at least one television spot was 82.3%. Modern contraceptive use increased 2.1 percentage points. The conditional change regression analysis revealed that prior contraceptive intention and behavior, current ideation, and prior ideation were the best predictors of contraceptive behavior. The best predictor of ideation was prior level of ideation and recall of campaign messages. Thus, the campaign had a significant indirect effect on intention and behavior through its effect on ideation. Ideation was operationalized by combining cognitive, emotional, and social factors from a predictive model of strategic communication and behavior change. No endogeneity (reciprocity) with contraceptive intention and use was found in the statistical models for either campaign recall or ideation, an indication that the ordinary regression was an appropriate method to estimate the path coefficients.