The prior project demonstrated dramatic media under-coverage of alcohol's role in crime and injury. This study will take a crucial next step-demonstrating through controlled experiment the impact of media coverage of alcohol's role in crime and injury. We will do so using a random sample of U.S. newspaper stories about crime and unintended injury. We will also utilize a national participant population reflecting U.S. demographic norms, to further increase the generalizability and potential public impact of our results. Stories will be experimentally manipulated into versions with and without mention of alcohol as a causal factor in the crime or accident. Outcomes will examine concern about alcohol-related risks and on support for alcohol-control policies. We will also assess possible psychological mechanisms for the effects of these news stories as well as for the effects of alcohol advertisements, following up encouraging preliminary study results in our laboratory. In particular, we will examine impact of advertisements on automatically-activated attitudes and evaluative conditioning mechanisms on young adults'alcohol risk perceptions and willingness to engage in risky alcohol-related behaviors, using an experimental design intended to replicate many of the contextual elements of actual television viewing behavior.
The proposed research has the potential to provide definitive evidence regarding the impact of reporters'and editors'choice to include or exclude information about alcohol's role in crime or injury. Our prior work suggests this helps shape alcohol risk perceptions and alcohol-control policy support in the U.S. population. Such findings might be used to influence journalism practice by media advocates and journalism faculty in journalism training programs. Moreover, the further examination of psychological mechanisms behind advertising as well as news effects may provide an increasingly convincing account of how and why advertisements may influence risk-taking behavior among adolescents and young adults, with potentially significant public-policy ramifications.
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