Recorded presentation

Armando Valdez, PhD, PRISM (Pacific Research Institute for Social Marketing), 201 San Antonio Circle, Suite 152, Mountain View, CA 94040, 650 917-6600, avaldez@aol.com

The goal of this campaign was to foster a community-wide environment that promotes attitudes and behaviors conducive to violence prevention. The campaign was developed in English, Spanish and Vietnamese to address the major language groups in Santa Clara County, California. The objectives of the campaign were to (1) create awareness of risk factors and stressors that pre-dispose individuals to violence, (2) validate and reinforce pro-social attitudes, values and behaviors that deter individuals and communities from the use of violence, and (3) inform populations at risk for violence of community resources available to help them engage in ‘protective’ activities that promote positive, non-violent behavior. The expected outcome of this campaign was to inoculate the public to violence by affirming community norms against violence and asserting everyone’s right to live in an environment that is safe and free from violence. The campaign combined conventional media—radio and television—to make violence prevention highly visible and define it as a social imperative. It also employed ethnic-specific print media and non-traditional community outreach methods to deliver the campaign’s messages to their intended audiences. Since 92% of all incidences of violence in the county involved child abuse and domestic violence, these forms of violence were addressed in the campaign. The community outreach efforts targeted ten high-risk zones in the county that were most at risk for violence based on reported incidence of child abuse and neglect. Formative research was conducted to develop the campaign messages and evaluate their efficacy in getting the intended messages across.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to (
• identify the behavioral constructs employed in designing the campaign messages, (
• understand the rationale for and methods used to reach the intended audiences, and (
• apply comparable theory and methods to reach multilingual urban populations with violence prevention messages.

Keywords: Violence Prevention, Community Health Promoters

Related Web page: none

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