Recent Literature on Drug Abuse Prevention and Mass Media: Focusing on Youth, Parents, Women and the Elderly

Abstract

This article reviews the recent literature on mass media campaigns and communication approaches promoting drug abuse prevention aimed at four target audiences: youth, parents, women, and the elderly. Media effectiveness, including advantages and disadvantages of each medium according to target audience, is discussed. Of the four target groups, the youth audience is the one most heavily studied by researchers and communicators. Parents, a relatively new advocacy group, can be viewed as targets and as intermediaries, although little research on either role has been documented. Women have been the targets of awareness campaigns, generally on the effects of tranquilizing drugs, while the elderly have been addressed on the topic of appropriate licit drug use. The importance of audience analysis, of segmenting audiences into subgroups, and of designing customized presentations has been cited as critical across all target populations.