« Taiwan Journal of Political Science No.84Publish: 2020/06

Toward an Evidence-based Public Policy Campaign:A Quasi-experimental Analysis of the Effectiveness of Types of Advertisements on the Drunk Driving Prevention Campaign in Taiwan

Author: Hung-yi Hsu,Li-liang Liu, & Don-yun Chen

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

“What kinds of policy campaign content should be the most effective?” This question has been a core issue among policymakers. Following the spirit of evidence-based policy, this study has used the case of the drunk driving prevention campaign in Taiwan to answer this essential question. Based on protection motivation theory (PMT), this study has categorized drunk driving prevention advertisements into three types: threat orientation, coping orientation, and threat-coping orientation. Participants (n625) were drunk drivers sampled from traffic education programs which were provided by the Taipei City Motor Vehicles Office and the New Taipei City Motor Vehicles Office. The quasi-experiment took place in the two aforementioned offices, where the three types of advertisements were shown respectively to three experiment groups while no ads were displayed to the control group. By using the pre-test and post-test questionnaires, this study measured the behavioral intention of avoiding drunk driving as the treatment effect. The result showed that the behavioral intention of avoiding drunk driving was not significantly different among the four groups. However, the threat-coping orientated advertisement had divergent effects on lighter drinkers and heavier drinkers. Compared to the control group where no ad was viewed, in the experiment group where the threat-coping orientated ad was viewed, heavier drinkers had a higher behavioral intention of avoiding drunk driving than lighter drinkers did, which implied that the drunk driving prevention advertisement based on PMT was more likely to exert a positive campaign effect on heavier drinkers. In the light of the research findings, this study suggests that more evidence-based designs should be incorporated into government campaign advertisements to leverage the policy campaign more precisely.

Keywords:Drunk Driving Prevention、Evidence-based Public Policy、Policy Campaign、Protection Motivation Theory、Quasi-Experimental Design