Health Communication Effectiveness: Using Underlying Processes to Understand the Relationship Between Health Risk Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions to Follow the Recommendations

Past health literature examining the effectiveness of health communication (e.g., Becker 1974; Kahn and Luce 2006; Rogers 1975, 1983) generally assumed that health-related messages initiate people’s assessments of risk and vulnerability and resulting coping strategies, which, in turn, influence intentions to follow message recommendations. Based on these models, consumers usually form risk perception attitudes and behavioral intentions to follow the recommendations in a deliberate way after assessing relevant factors in the communication. Furthermore, attitudes and intentions are generally assumed to be positively correlated. A recent meta-analysis by Keller and Lehmann (2006), however, suggests that the consistency between attitudes and intentions is not always true because some contextual factors (e.g., message framing) could affect attitudes and behavioral intentions in opposite ways. No systematic theories have been suggested to date to explain why changes in attitudes and behavioral intentions are positively correlated in some situations but negatively correlated in others. Understanding these questions has important implications for the effective design of health