Media advocacy for alcohol policy support: results from the New Zealand Community Action Project

Abstract

Media advocacy has been described as the strategic use of mass media for advancing a social or public policy initiative. This paper describes an attempt to use media advocacy to increase public awareness and support for public health policies on alcohol in a demonstration project. The New Zealand Community Action Project (CAP) was an evaluated alcohol problem prevention programme which compared cities exposed to a mass media campaign with, and without, community organization, against reference cities. Media advocacy was an element in both a community organization strategy and in a print media advertising campaign. Major objectives of CAP were to increase the level of support for alcohol policies in the general population and to increase the amount of alcohol-related material (excluding liquor industry promotion) in the local print media. Evaluation of the media advocacy strategies are reported from an analysis of alcohol-related material in the local print media, from a general population survey conducted in the six cities, a complementary qualitative key informants interview study, and a street interview survey. The results indicated that in the four cities where. mass media only or intrusive intervention (mass media and community organization) were employed, there was increased newspaper coverage of alcohol-related material on the focus areas of moderation and social policy. Results from the general population survey, the key informants interview study and the street interview survey suggested a positive effect of the programme both in the media only, and in the intensive intervention cities, compared with the reference cities.

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