Evaluation of Sexual Communication Message Strategies

We content analyzed 4 PSUNC ads to identify specific, measurable message and advertising execution features. We then develop quantitative measures of those features, including message strategies, marketing strategies, and voice and other stylistic features, and merged the resulting data into a dataset drawn from a national media tracking survey of the campaign. Finally, we conducted multivariable logistic regression models to identify relationships between message content and ad reactions/receptivity, and between ad reactions/receptivity and parents' cognitions related to sexual communication included in the campaign's conceptual model.We found that overall parents were highly receptive to the PSUNC ads. We did not find significant associations between message content and ad reactions/receptivity. However, we found that reactions/receptivity to specific PSUNC ads were associated with increased norms, self-efficacy, short- and long-term expectations about parent-child sexual communication, as theorized in the conceptual model.This study extends previous research and methods to analyze message content and reactions/receptivity. The results confirm and extend previous PSUNC campaign evaluation and provide further evidence for the conceptual model. Future research should examine additional message content features and the effects of reactions/receptivity.Parent-child sexual communication is an important proximal outcome for programs designed to reduce negative adolescent reproductive health outcomes such as early sexual activity, HIV/STIs, and pregnancy or repeat pregnancy [1-3]. The Parents Speak Up National Campaign (PSUNC) is an evidence-based social marketing campaign that has been shown to be efficacious in increasing parent-child communication and behavioral determinants such as beliefs and intentions to communicate [4,5]. The campaign's conceptual model, based on Social Cognitive Theory, has also been validated [6]. Evans and colleagues (2011) found that increase