Delving Deeper into Research- Formative Evaluation Research

Formative evaluation research can enhance a campaign’s effectiveness by guiding the development of sophisticated strategies and effective messages and providing data and perspectives to improve message creation. It can also be helpful for determining which approaches are the most promising or counterproductive.  

The first phase of formative evaluation research is preproduction research. In this phase, data are accumulated on audience characteristics that relate to the medium, the message, and the situation within which the desired behavior will occur.  Preproduction research usually occurs through focus groups, surveys, and secondary analysis.  Preproduction research can be further enhanced by sense making methodology that encompasses in depth interviews. During preproduction research there are 4 broad areas that campaign planners usually explore:

• Identifying audience segments- in this area, the primary and secondary audience are identified
• Specifying focal behaviors- identify the promising options that are the most amenable to change, isolating certain unpopular but essential behaviors that will require persuasive emphasis, and eliminating campaign from certain peripheral behaviors that will be widely resisted by the audience
• Elaborating cognitive and affective variables- this area takes into consideration knowledge, literacy, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, values, salience priorities, efficacy and skills
• Ascertaining channel usage patters- amount of time spent using various communication mediums 

The second phase of formative evaluation research is pretesting. Pretesting is a systematic process that gathers information on the intended audience’s reaction to preliminary version of messages before the final production.  Pretesting differentiates between, developing and testing the concept vs. creating and testing the test message.  Concepts are ideas that can take the form of sketches, key phrases, etc.  Pretesting in the concept phase can be particularly useful to provide direction and eliminating weaker approaches, which can save time and money.  It can also be useful in generating vernacular and appropriate language can be revised for the target audience.  After moving from concept to test message, campaign developers are testing a complete message in the rough form.  At this stage campaign developers are assessing how effective a message will be by assessing:

• Attention
• Measuring comprehension
• Identify strong and weak points
• Determining personal relevance
• Gauging sensitive or controversial elements

Techniques used to pretest are:

• Focus groups
• Individual in depth interviews
• Central-location intercept interviews
• Self-administered questioners 
• Theater testing
• Readability testing
• Usability testing
• Gatekeeper review 

Rice, R., & Atkin, C. (1989). Public communication campaigns. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.