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Research is needed regarding how to influence young adults’ patterns of cell phone use while driving, amid social pressures to stay connected to their peers. Such insight could form the basis of a social marketing campaign. This study aims to explore the potential of inoculation and narrative messages as strategies to protect (i.e. generate resistance against) negative attitudes toward texting and driving.

Using a three-phase experiment, the investigation explored the impact of different communication message strategies (i.e. inoculation, narrative, control) aimed at reducing texting while driving.

Results indicated that, for college students exposed to messages in support of texting and driving, inoculation messages were superior to both narrative and control messages. These findings can guide the development of strategic social marketing interventions.

Social marketing scholars and practitioners should consider weaving inoculation messages throughout social marketing campaigns focused on this important issue.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate and compare inoculation and narrative strategies in the context of texting and driving.

Public service announcements (PSAs) are frequently used tools to try to change attitudes and behaviors on social issues, including texting and driving, which has been social problem for over a decade. However, the effectiveness of such PSA campaigns often meet with varying degrees of success, suggesting changes to current anti-texting and driving campaigns are needed. This study aims to examine how to design more effective anti-texting and driving PSA campaigns by identifying the elements of existing campaigns that have the strongest impact on attitude change.

In total, 682 respondents from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participated in an online study in which they evaluated 162 real-world anti-texting and driving ads. Respondents evaluated the ads on various ad elements (i.e. type of appeal, source of emotion, discrete emotions and perceived creativity), as well as their attitudes toward the issue after seeing the ad.

PSAs that use emotional (vs rational) appeals, evoke emotion through imagery (vs text) and/or use fear (vs disgust, anger or guilt) result in the largest changes in attitude. In addition, more creative PSAs are more effective at changing attitudes.

Overall, the results provide useful information to social marketers on how to design more effective anti-texting and driving campaigns.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of matching social distance and the concrete/abstract visual presentation of the threats of distracted driving in campaign design.

This study conducts a series of 2 (social distance frame: close vs distant) × 2 (visual rhetoric style: literal vs metaphorical) online experiments on the perspective of the construal level theory.

This study identified that a fit between social distance and visual rhetoric style of the threat enhances the effect of a social marketing campaign targeting young adults. A message framed in terms of socially proximal entities shows a favorable impact on young drivers’ threat perception and behavioral intention when the visual rhetoric depicts the threats of texting while driving more concrete. On the other hand, more distant social entities in the message show a better impact when the threats are visualized in metaphor.

This paper enhances the understanding of a threat appeal message design by adding empirical evidence of matching visual rhetoric style and social distance. The findings provide theoretical and practical implications for social marketing campaigns, regarding the strategic tailoring of messages, particularly in public service announcements that discourage texting while driving on young adults.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of driver demographic characteristics on the driving safety involving cell phone usages.

A total of 1,432 crashes and 19,714 baselines were collected for the Strategic Highway Research Program 2 naturalistic driving research. The authors used a case-control approach to estimate the prevalence and the population attributable risk percentage. The mixed logistic regression model is used to evaluate the correlation between different driver demographic characteristics (age, driving experience or their combination) and the crash risk regarding cell phone engagements, as well as the correlation among the likelihood of the cell phone engagement during the driving, multiple driver demographic characteristics (gender, age and driving experience) and environment conditions.

Senior drivers face an extremely high crash risk when distracted by cell phone during driving, but they are not involved in crashes at a large scale. On the contrary, cell phone usages account for a far larger percentage of total crashes for young drivers. Similarly, experienced drivers and experienced-middle-aged drivers seem less likely to be impacted by the cell phone while driving, and cell phone engagements are attributed to a lower percentage of total crashes for them. Furthermore, experienced, senior or male drivers are less likely to engage in cell phone-related secondary tasks while driving.

The results provide support to guide countermeasures and vehicle design.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze message features of fear appeals in current British road safety campaigns directed against mobile phone use while driving and to discuss barriers to explicit theory use in campaign message design.

This message-centred research takes a qualitative content analytical approach to analyze nine British web-based road safety campaigns directed against mobile phone use while driving based on the extended parallel process model. Message content and message structure are analyzed.

There still exists a gap between theory and road safety campaign practice. The study reveals that campaigns with fear appeals primarily use threatening messages but neglect efficacy-based contents. Severity messages emerge as the dominant content type while self-efficacy and response efficacy are hardly represented. Fear appeal content in the threat component was mainly communicated through the mention of legal, financial and physical harm, whereas efficacy messages communicated success stories and encouragement. As regards message structure, the threat component always preceded the efficacy component. Within each component, different patterns emerged.

To enhance efficacy in campaigns directed against distracted driving and to reduce the gap between theory and practice, social marketers should include messages that empower recipients to abstain from mobile phone use while driving. Campaigns should show recommended behaviours and highlight their usefulness and effectiveness.

This paper adds to limited research conducted on effect-independent message properties of fear appeals. It enhances understanding of fear appeal message features across the structure and content dimension. By discussing barriers to explicit theory use in social marketing practice and offering practical implications for social marketers, it contributes towards reducing the barriers to explicit theory use in campaign message design.

The purpose of this paper was to assess a health communication campaign designed to reduce distracted driving among college students within the USA.

Utilizing central interviewing techniques, participants were asked qualitative and quantitative items soliciting feedback concerning the efficacy of the messages.

The findings indicated students understood, believed, found the messages appealing, and thought the campaign discouraged distracted driving. Several themes emerged from the qualitative analysis, including the prominence of the logo, recommendation to use bright colors, and the suggestion to use more intense graphics.

First, the data were collected by conducting interviews, potentially leading to some shortcomings associated with self-reported data. Second, while the results indicated that participants perceived that the messages discouraged distracted driving, none of the central intercept interview items assessed participants’ intentions to change their behavior. Third, a convenience sample was used, and thus the generalizability of the results are limited and warrant further research. Finally, because multiple researchers conducted the interviews, it is possible that data were interpreted differently, which could pose a threat to inter-rater reliability.

Message testing provides practitioners with invaluable feedback in designing effective messages. However, suggestions from the target audience need to be carefully considered before revising messages, as the lay public are not experts in prevention.

Message testing provides health educators with a specific method to receive feedback from the target audience to ensure they understand and are motivated by the message, resulting in a more effective health communication campaign.

Little is known regarding the impact of organizational policies and practices on police officers’ driving behaviors. To address an important gap in the empirical literature, this study examined how perceived likelihood of discipline for violations of agency driving policies impacted officer-involved vehicle collisions.

Surveys were distributed to patrol officers and their supervisors in eight California law enforcement agencies. The surveys elicited information regarding the perceived likelihood of discipline for violations of agency driving policies regarding cell phone use, text messaging, seatbelt use, speeding, and vehicle operations during emergency and pursuit situations.

The findings demonstrated a significant impact of perceived likelihood of enforcement for some but not all agency driving policies on officer-involved vehicle collisions.

This study was limited to self-reported data from patrol officers and their supervisors in eight California agencies.

Findings suggest that agencies may reduce officer injuries and other costs by increasing supervision and enforcement of agency driving policies.

This study contributes to the extant body of literature on officer-involved vehicle collisions by considering the impact of agency policy and supervision on officer behavior.

With the ubiquitous diffusion of mobile-enabled internet, individuals are constantly immersed in both virtual and physical environments. While this causes distractions, lower attention spans and disasters such as texting while driving and walking, it also creates synergies and smoother navigational experiences. Technology developers, marketers and policy-makers are both concerned and intrigued to understand how to deploy these mobile technologies so as to optimize their disruptive impact. In this paper, the authors aim to develop a framework of dual consciousness to understand the potential causes and outcomes of individual’s simultaneous presence in physical and virtual worlds.

A careful review of past academic literature on behavior, as well as media reports of incidents of disruptions, led the authors to construct a 2 × 2 framework depicting behaviors that indicated high-low consciousness in physical, as well as virtual worlds.

In dual environments, individuals either dissociate from one of the environments or integrate both environments. While the former is driven by the multiplicity of irrelevant roles and goals, oblivion of relevant roles, perception of group norms and performance of practiced routine tasks, the latter is driven by strong executive control processes, focused singular goals and usage of the virtual environment to reinforce their physical tasks. The most affected parties are retailers, service providers, digital marketers and social media marketers.

Most prior research in interactive marketing examine effects of online stimuli on online behavior. This paper identifies the noise created by physical context on clicks as well as the interference created by virtual stimuli on physical purchases and service experiences.

Global issues on the environment, such as climate change, air pollution and carbon monoxide emission, are the primary concerns in any part of the world. The purpose of this paper is to construct a conceptual framework for the travel behavior performance of a commuter, and it is expected to mitigate air pollution from vehicle emission and to promote smart mobility on the road.

From the extensive literature review, the conceptual framework for the travel behavior performance of a commuter has been developed and is supported by the theory of interpersonal behavior (TIB), whose functions are attitude, social factor, affect and habit. In the present paper, attitude is conceptualized by four predictors, namely confidence in driving, green environment, social responsibility and deviation in driving. The social factor is characterized by subjective norms, social status and digitalization. Affect factor is conceptualized by accidents and damages, road infrastructure, and weather conditions. The mental block in following the ancestor’s way of owning a personal vehicle is the predictor for the habit.

One of the major contributors to environmental damages is road traffic. Notably, vehicle emissions are on the rise every year due to the increase of reliance on vehicles, and there is no alternative to this issue. Although Malaysia has a well-organized infrastructure with effective digitalized technology on the road for the transport system, there is severe traffic congestion in Klang Valley, Kuala Lumpur, because of a lack of travel plan behavior during peak hours. If the road commuters give the predictors constructed in the proposed conceptual framework the highest importance, then there will be much relief to traffic congestion on the road.

Since the present study focuses on the conceptualization of an urban travel behavior model (UTBM), and also highlights the synchronization of the proposed framework with the management theory, the results are expected after the primary survey based on the cross-sectional study will be conducted.

The identification of the suitable predictors for the UTBM toward the travel behavior performance of a commuter is the real novelty of the present study. Also, the cause and effect relationships of different predictors in terms of path directions of the proposed research framework are the highlights of the study. Further, the predictors in the proposed framework and the TIB have been synchronized with operational definitions, which are the original contributions of the present study, which will enhance the sustainable environmental development for the society as a whole.