The effectiveness of persuasive messages referring to being a "good mother", addressed to mothers of preschool children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15503/onis2020.62.70Keywords:
good mother, perfect mother, maternal pressure, mother's fault, maternal guilt, effectiveness of persuasion, guilt and persuasionAbstract
Aim. The aim of the research was to empirically test the hypothesis that a persuasive message which creates pressure to be a good mother, addressed to mothers, is more effective than a message that does not create the pressure to be a good mother.
Research methods. The study involved 64 mothers of pre-school children, aged 21 to 47, with between 1 and 4 children, aged from 5 months to 20 years. The study was carried out in the experimental model. Data was collected using an evaluation questionnaire concerning the stimulus material and an interview with the subjects on the content of the used persuasive messages.
Results. The obtained data showed that the stimulus material that contained the message referring to being a good mother turned out to be on average more effective than the material not referencing being a good mother. However, he results of the Mann-Whitney U test showed that the differences between the groups are not statistically significant. Therefore a qualitative analysis of respondents' opinions on the content of messages was made. A statistical analysis of qualitative data using the chi-square test did not show statistical significance.
Conclusions. The results do not confirm the adopted hypothesis. A persuasive message, referring to being a good mother, was not found to be more effective than a message that did not refer to being a good mother. Possible explanations for the obtained effect are the model of persuasion dualism (Petty, Cacioppo, 1990) and the influence of emotions on the effectiveness of the persuasive message (Leventhal, 1970). Although the results obtained in the experiment did not confirm the accepted hypothesis, they nevertheless suggest that it is worth to continue research in this field, not only using a questionnaire and structured intelligence, but measuring real behavior of the subjects.
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