News
Wednesday 23 January 2008
More work needed on racial awareness campaigns
The true value of racial awareness campaigns has come under the spotlight following research at Nottingham Trent University. A report, led by the Centre for the Study and Reduction of Hate Crimes, Bias and Prejudice (NCSRHC) in the University’s School of Social Sciences, has found evidence to suggest such campaigns, unless properly designed, are most likely to be ineffective in reducing prejudice and discrimination.
A key finding to emerge from the Communities and Local Government-commissioned study - Getting the message across: using media to reduce racial prejudice and discrimination – was that racial awareness campaigns can actually backfire and increase people’s prejudice if not well-designed or researched properly.
The purpose of the study was to determine the most effective methods of communicating messages to counteract racial prejudice. The findings are intended to guide implementation, targeting, design, message content, delivery and evaluation of campaigns that seek to tackle prejudice and discrimination, and develop greater community cohesion and social inclusion.
Researchers found that intuition and good intentions alone were not enough to reduce racially prejudiced attitudes and behaviour. For an initiative to have any chance of success it needed to negotiate sensitive regional, social, political, ethnic and cultural factors – issues sometimes neglected.
Although some campaigns – spearheaded by a range of organisations – may have been successful in working to reduce racial prejudices, others, it seemed, could reaffirm stereotypes.
“The primary aim of an initiative to reduce racial prejudice or discrimination should be to change the lives of victims of racial discrimination for the better,” said Dr Mike Sutton, Director of NCSRHC and Reader in Criminology, Public Health and Policy Studies at Nottingham Trent University.
“However, if careful attention is not paid to what we know about effective advertising in initiatives to reduce prejudice, some campaigns and programmes might actually backfire and increase people’s prejudice. Research in attitude change suggests that, efforts to reduce racial prejudice or discrimination may, for example, be interpreted as favouritism towards one ethnic group. Good intentions and intentions to simply raise awareness – that have characterised the aims of the most well known campaigns in the UK are not enough and may be counterproductive.”
Findings from an exhaustive synthesis of existing research over the past 15 years, suggested that simple use of facts and figures were not sufficient to change attitudes, and initiatives aimed at perpetrators of racial discrimination could be unintentionally patronising to those who had experienced its impact firsthand.
A message was more likely to be effective if it was straightforward, jargon-free, and avoided emotionally extreme language. Repetition of the message was more likely to help reduce prejudice, along with sources seen as having credibility, attractiveness, expertise, status and power.
In a series of recommendations, based upon their retrospective evaluation of the most major campaigns in the UK, the research team stated that understanding how a campaign message was interpreted is critical, and that messages should contradict, not reaffirm stereotypes. Emphasis should be placed on how groups are similar, rather than distinct from one another, and that campaigns must set aims higher than simple awareness raising, to measure their effectiveness in reducing prejudice and discrimination.
For any chance of success, robust evaluation should be built into designs from the outset.
Dr Sutton said: “Clearly there is a need for those who design media-based prejudice reduction initiatives to gather data about the attitudes and opinions that are held by intended audiences, the factors underpinning them, and to assess what motivation there might be for target audiences to accept the messages aimed at them.
He added: “Most importantly, the design of such initiatives should take on board the lessons from academic studies of effective attitude change, and those implementing them should monitor and evaluate their impact. This is a simple common sense message and while it is clearly not rocket science our research has found that in most cases this minimum of standards is not being applied in what is currently an extremely sensitive and important area.”
ENDS
Dr Mike Sutton, who led the project, was joined by Professor Barbara Perry, Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for the Study and Reduction of Hate Crimes; Catherine John-Baptiste, a lecturer in social work at Nottingham Trent University; and Jonathon Parke, a Senior Lecturer at Salford University.
To measure the effectiveness of campaigns, the team used an evaluation framework developed by Professor Nick Tilley of Nottingham Trent University.
To view the report visit http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/611667.
Press enquiries please contact: Dave Rogers, Press Officer, on +44 (0)115 848 8782, or email dave.rogers@ntu.ac.uk.
Or Therese Easom, Press and Media Relations Manager, on +44 (0)115 848 8774, or email therese.easom@ntu.ac.uk.
