Recorded presentation

Thomas F. Babor, PhD, MPH¹, Alfred Xuan¹, and Dwayne Proctor, PhD². (1) Department of Community Medicine and Health Care, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, 263 Farmington Avenue, Farmington, CT 06030-6325, 860-679-5482, babor@nso.uchc.edu, (2) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Route 1 & College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08543-2316

This presentation describes the development and psychometric properties of a new method to evaluate industry compliance self-regulation codes that are used to guide the marketing and content of both TV and print advertisement for malt liquor products. First, formative research was conducted using focus group methods to develop rating scale measures of industry guidelines. Next, a test-retest reliability study of the rating scales was conducted in both community and university samples with a total of 74 participants. Approximately 50 items covering the content guidelines were rated at Time 1 (test) and Time 2 (retest), with a test-retest interval of one week, using four TV ads and one print ad as separate stimuli. The reliability coefficients were good to excellent for individual items and for each of the eleven content guidelines evaluated. There was considerable variation among ads, with violations ranging from 0 to 3 using a new scoring system developed for this project. The findings indicate: 1) Naïve (untrained) raters can provide consistent (reliable) ratings of the main content guidelines proposed in the U.S. Beer Code. 2) The content rating procedure produces consistent differences among different advertisements, indicating that raters are capable of differentiating among ads that contain or do not contain code violations.

Learning Objectives:

• At the conclusion of the presentation participants should be more aware of the content guidelines of the industry codes governing the advertising of malt liquor products, and of ways to provide better regulation of malt liquor advertising in both print and television media.

Keywords: Alcohol Problems, Public Health Policy

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.

Recorded presentation