Reactions to Safer-Sex Public Service Announcement Message Features: Attention, Perceptions of Realism, and Cognitive Responses

For this article, we conducted a qualitative investigation of participants’ reactions to five televised public service announcements (PSAs) that were aired as part of a large safer-sex mass media campaign to increase condom use among young adults. We conducted qualitative interviews (N = 139) to determine which features of PSAs participants thought were most effective in terms of attention and recall, perceived realism of characters and situations, and cognitive responses. Our analysis of the results highlights the importance of high-sensation-value messages for gaining attention as well as the critical role of personal relevance for enhancing perceptions of realism. Cognitive responses to PSAs were mostly positive, but there was evidence of third-person effects. That is, many participants indicated that the safer-sex messages were important for other people but not for themselves. We discuss the implications of our results for designing PSAs that are attention-catching, realistic, and persuasive.