I have decided to change my topic for this week from talking about the Palestine and Israel Health Initiative because it is a project that is still being set up and there is not much information on it besides why it is necessary. Instead, this week I will look at the role of public education and public health campaigns, and how they are/aren’t effective, and possibly why.
First, I want to look at a campaign that was targeted at an important issue in this country. Currently, between 16-33% of children and adolescents are obese (about 9 million children over the age of 6 years old are obese). Unhealthy weight gain from poor diet and lack of exercise is responsible for about 300,000 deaths per year; also, the cost of obesity to society is very high, estimated annually to be about $1 billion dollars. Furthermore, there are very many comorbidities that come along with obesity, especially if the obesity begins as a child. Thus, it is essential that obesity is curbed in the beginning - obese children and adolescents are much more likely to be obese as adults. Because of this important obesity epidemic that this country faces, I want to look at a campaign aimed at children to promote healthy exercise behaviors - I’m sure you’ve seen the ads from this campaign before - the VERB campaign. These ads were multimedia, and were targeted at kids aged 9-13 to try and encourage them to be more active. The ads took form of paid advertising, community programs, and Internet activities. The major outcomes that were examined were “awareness of the campaign and self-reported free-time and organized physical activity sessions.”
In the study, it was found that after 1 year, about 74% of the children knew about the or had heard about the campaign. Levels of reported physical activity increased in some subgroups in this population: younger children (9-10), girls, children whose parents had less than a high school education level, children who lived in densely populated urban areas, and children who were rarely active at baseline. What’s interesting is that out of these subgroups, only those who were rarely active at baseline had an increase in organized activity - the other subgroups increased their free-time physical activity. Essentially, this VERB campaign was able to achieve high levels of awareness just within 1 year, and that child focused advertisements are effective.
Looking at the implications of this study, and how it relates to other similar studies and campaigns (some of which I will look at next week, such as many of Singapore’s effective public health campaigns and the Truth anti-smoking campaign for teenagers in the U.S.), I think the overall message is that these public education campaigns can have a huge impact on the public health of a society. By using a multimedia approach in this world that is increasingly wired and technoly-savvy, many of th epotentials of information and communication technologies can be met. The VERB campaign indicates that even though physical activity, something that many know to be essential to reducing rates of obesity and something that is required in many schools, can be improved on. In my blog on Egypt and it’s use of ICT, the campaign was to get people to know about the importance of using ORS - in this case, people for the most part know that physical activity is good for their health - it’s interesting that a public health campaign can still be so impactful. One hypothesis that this study makes me consider is that the use of multimedia increased activity rates in the subgroups specifically because it allowed for the information to be received by more people, so that younger children, girls, those in crowded neighborhoods, and those who had less educated parents would get this healthy point emphasized. Basically, it might be because these subgroups have a more restricted access to physical activity for a variety of reasons, and the public education campaign might have overrode the reasons, increased the parents’ understanding, or encouraged the children. This analysis then leads me to the statement that ICT and multimedia presentations of an idea, while there might be issues of access, can also increase access to quality care because it allows for groups that might not have access to certain types of information all the means to understand the information in an easy, accessible way. I feel like the subgroups who did have an increase in physical activity may have been the subgroups that had restricted access to higher quality care and information about physical activity, and the multimedia public health campaigns narrowed the information gap between the groups. In this sense, ICT is decreasing the resource gap because of the multimedia approach, rather than increasing it by providing information only to those with TVs, etc. The results of this campaign are promising, and it should demonstrate to other public health campaigns how important it is to analyze who the target audience is and how to best cater the ICT approach to the target population.
http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for_families/obesity_in_children_and_teens, May 2008.
http://www.iom.edu/Object.File/Master/22/606/FINALfactsandfigures2.pdf, September 2004
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/116/2/e277
I have been really interested in health education campaigns- on an intuitive level, it seems like education just would not be enough! I guess we should not underestimate the power of good marketing and mass individual action. I personally can’t believe the VERB campaign worked- I saw those ads all the time, but never considered that they might be a government-sponsored public health campaign. I guess it made doing activities look cooler, and therefore perhaps more children wanted to do physical activities. You touched on this briefly, but I wonder exactly how the campaign was successful. Is there evidence that it inspired parents to enroll the kids, or helped educators to take action, or was it mostly the kids themselves who were motivated by the ads?
I don’t think I’ve heard of that campaign, but I wonder what exactly made the campaign so successful? What methods and media did they use? Connecting education/awareness with behavior change is an issue that many global health programs must tackle, and so other programs (such as HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns) could gain insight on becoming more effective from this obesity campaign.