A campaign for preventing child maltreatment

What is it about?

This article discusses the development and pretesting of key visual imagery in a promotional campaign that is the media-based component of a broader prevention strategy. The purpose was to pretest with parents the preliminary version of a poster that uses the campaign’s key visual imagery prior to final production. For that purpose, 26 parents participated in four focus groups. The paper reports their reactions to the poster, and how these reactions were used to produce the final layout.

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Why is it important?

While developing a media-based promotion or prevention campaign, it is important to conduct prior formative research to optimize campaign effectiveness. But despite this well recognized fact, very few articles report examples of formative research being applied to concrete situations, and the few examples are in the area of physical health. Since child maltreatment is a serious and prevalent public health issue, stakeholders must have examples te rely on, and this paper makes an important contribution to this end.