Planned social change is the result of an intervention by a change agent (an individual or organization that seeks to induce change) in order to transform the nature of human communities, most often as a response to some perceived problem such as health risks, environmental crises, political instability, economic hardships, underdeveloped infrastructures, and recovery from natural disasters. Thus, there are a variety of contexts in which planned social change is practiced including health communication, political transformation, crisis management, technological innovation, and modernization. Across each of these areas, the predominant goal is to improve the quality of life and the standard of living within a given social system. Ostensibly, the goal of planned social change is the betterment of society, though there may be no consensus on which goals of the campaign are most important and indeed whether they are socially desirable at all.
Most planned social change campaigns can be divided into three basic phases. First, there is a planning stage in which all relevant situational information is assessed and strategies are formulated. Second, there is an implementation phase in which campaign strategies are put into action. Finally, there is an evaluation phase in which the performance of the campaign is assessed so that future campaigns can benefit from lessons learned. Successful campaigns rely on extensive research during each of these stages.
The mass media are often a crucial tool in the hands of change agents by transmitting information, setting the public agenda, and mobilizing the public. A major issue in the research literature on social change campaigns is how to maximize the effectiveness of mass media in the change process. Among the keys to the successful use of mass media are creating messages that resonate with the intended audience, and placing messages efficiently by targeting the most likely prospects for inducing change, and avoiding the already converted and change-resistant members of the audience.
Evaluations of past social change campaigns indicate that significant long-term, desired change is extremely difficult to achieve. Moreover, variance in effectiveness across different campaigns suggests that the complex situational constraints that regulate success make each case unique. The effectiveness of planned social change campaigns depends on a variety of factors including the cultural compatibility of the goals, strategies, and tactics of the campaign, the quality of research and planning, the availability of necessary resources, the salience and efficacy of campaign messages in the media environment, and the lack of resistance from community institutions, opinion leaders and the public at large.
Perhaps more so than any other area of communication research, planned social change research represents a dramatic mix of basic and applied research. It also brings together researchers interested in the psychological processes involved in regulating social change in individuals and those interested in more macrosociological processes related to improving society such as patterns in the distribution of information, knowledge, resources, and power.
At the heart of the planned social change process are such basic theoretical concerns as education, motivation, and persuasion. Each of these processes has been used by planned social change campaigns as both antecedents and consequences. For example, campaigns may target learning, motivation, and attitude/behavior change outcomes. Alternatively, learning and motivation may be key antecedents (mediators) to producing changes in attitudes and behaviors. In turn, changes in individual attitudes and behaviors may be key milestones on the path to the betterment of communities. Driven by the desire to maximize the power and positive outcomes of social change programs, practitioners have traditionally been very concerned with developing and testing underlying theories. By the same token, social change campaigns are concerned with applied outcomes, testing actual effects in real-world settings. In other words, planned social change projects tend to be theory-driven and research-evaluated.
Another characteristic of planned social change is an implicit assumption about the prosocial benefits of potential campaign effects. That is, in most cases, those involved in planned social change campaigns often assume that if the campaign is successful, society and the individuals that comprise it will be better off. There are value-laden decisions involved in the design and implementation of planned social change. The degree to which the larger community is in consensus regarding the social desirability of the goals and decisions of the campaign is likely to vary widely.
Research on planned social change is by nature an interdisciplinary endeavor, both historically and contemporaneously. First, historical contributions to knowledge in planned social change have come in virtually all social science disciplines (as discussed below). Second, contemporary research evaluating the effects of large-scale, planned social change campaigns often involves researchers from multiple disciplines, for example, the Minnesota Heart Health Project (MHHP), which was a community-based campaign designed to promote heart-healthy behaviors among citizens in three experimental Minnesota communities. The project, which ran from 1980 to 1993, brought together researchers from communication, psychology, sociology, social work, marketing, biostatistics, epidemiology, and medicine.
Strategic campaigns for social change are likely to be extremely resource-intensive in terms of the staffing, research, and media costs of developing, implementing, and evaluating the campaign. As such, most large-scale campaigns are dependent on government and private foundation funding. This means that such campaigns are more likely to be top-down and to reflect interests consistent with these institutions. Though such campaigns are likely to espouse elite values, many of the problems they address have the most adverse effects on the poor who may often be the beneficiaries of social change. Moreover, not all campaigns are conducted by organizations with access to copious resources. Grassroots organizations can be successful in engaging in planned social change; however, it is likely that the scope, objectives, and tactics will have to be more modest in order to reflect their relatively limited resources.
In response to these concerns, more recently, some have argued for a different approach, community-based participatory research (CBPR) where, ideally, the community is an equal partner with the researchers from the defining the problem to the execution of the study, interpretation of the data and dissemination of the research. Whether CPBR, in practice, produces more sustainable outcomes requires more empirical work.
The important dimensions of planned social change can be organized according to Lasswell’s (1948) model of the communication process: “Who says what to whom through what channel with what effect.”
Those who initiate planned social change campaigns are known as change agents, which most frequently consist of government agencies, political parties, businesses, academic researchers, health communication professionals, interest groups, nonprofit organizations, and social movements.
When change agents and the communication messages that they produce come in contact with the target audience, campaign effectiveness may be reduced if the audience perceives them to be external to the culture they are trying to change. As such, most campaigns engage local change agents for points of contact with the target audience.
This dimension focuses on the messages of the campaign. Understanding the important components of successful messages involves invoking bodies of knowledge drawn from applied academic research and professional experiences from the fields of advertising and public relations. For instance, campaign messages must be both attention-grabbing and memorable to cut through the clutter of the thousands of persuasive messages to which targeted individuals are exposed on a daily basis. There are other content choices as well that must be made on the basis of a thorough situation analysis. Should the campaign use rational, information-based appeals or more evocative emotional appeals? In part this depends on such factors as the amount of information that the audience needs in order to make decisions, the difficulty of gaining the attention of the audience, and the degree to which targeted audience members are motivated to process information.
Advertising also contributes different templates for the types of messages that might be successful in different situations such as humor, guilt, fear appeals, narratives, exemplars, and frames among others. Fear appeals are likely to be particularly useful in social change campaigns, as they often communicate negative sanctions for not complying with the recommended attitude and/ or behavior change. A variety of models have been proposed to account for the effectiveness of fear appeals (e.g., the fear drive paradigm, the protection motivation model, the threat control model). Among the factors that these models contribute are the believability of the fear appeal, the perceived likelihood that failure to follow the recommended behavior will lead to negative consequences, the perceived likelihood that the recommended behavior will prevent negative outcomes, and the perceived personal efficacy of following the recommended course of action. There is also a general consensus regarding the appropriate level of fear used in messages – it should not be so weak that it has no effect, but not so strong that it overwhelms the target audience or motivates counterarguing and other discounting strategies.
The practice of public relations has contributed knowledge on how to extend campaign resources by using strategies to engage the news media to cover stories that will advance campaign goals. Not only does good news coverage contribute free publicity, but it may also add credibility to the message. For example, campaigns to ban smoking in public places may benefit from news stories about the potential harms of second-hand smoke. To get news media attention, events and messages must be constructed to conform to the demands of news values and practices. For instance, they must fit media definitions of what constitutes a good story and must be packaged to fit media conventions in terms of content and timing.
Not only can news content be used to reinforce a campaign, but entertainment programming may be engaged as well. An “entertainment-education strategy” may be used to embed messages in entertainment programs for transmitting information to stimulate change through storytelling. For example, Mexican soap operas have been used to transmit messages about the importance of family planning, responsible parenting, and literacy. Entertainment programming has many advantages over traditional media for inducing change. Entertainment media are ubiquitous and emotionally evocative; they are valued, if not revered, by their audience. They are vivid and demonstrative. Finally, their intentions are less likely to be recognized and discounted by the audience (Brown & Singhal 1999). Unfortunately, we know little about the effectiveness of using entertainment media as part of social change campaigns. Clearly more research is needed to guide the application of nontraditional campaign media, as well as to evaluate their effectiveness.
Most planned social change campaigns target individuals with messages tailored to change individual attitudes and behaviors. Successful campaigns know that it is important to target some individuals more than others, specifically, individuals who are most likely to respond to the messages, which may include those who are likely to be motivated to receive, process, and yield to campaign messages, as well as those who are likely to influence the opinions and behaviors of others. Exploratory research may be used to identify the characteristics of individuals who are likely to be persuaded and those who are likely to persuade others. Such research may also be useful in making decisions about what types of messages to create for them as well as where to place those messages as part of a cost-efficient media plan.
Researchers may not only be concerned with the characteristics of the potential target audience, but also with differences in the way that different types of individuals process these messages. For example, dual-process models (i.e., the elaboration likelihood model and the heuristic systematic model) emphasize the message receiver’s level of involvement as a moderator of message effects. High-involvement individuals tend to have greater motivation and ability to thoroughly process the crucial information in the message. On other hand, low-involvement individuals tend to look for heuristic shortcuts to message processing by focusing on peripheral information such as communicator attractiveness or the number of arguments presented. Insights from these models have a number of implications for planned social change campaigns including the production of different messages targeting high- and low-involvement audiences.
Researchers have known for many years that certain individuals (i.e., opinion leaders) among the target population are likely to have disproportionate influence. As such, many campaigns seek to capitalize on influence flows within community networks by identifying and engaging opinion leaders directly as part of the campaign. Moreover, media expenditures may be more efficient by targeting opinion leaders to take advantage of the “two-step flow” of information, as messages are filtered through highly influential individuals. Research has shown that opinion leaders differ from one context to another, so campaigns must identify the context-specific characteristics of opinion leaders. Moreover, opinion leaders may be part of community networks or part of the mediated world, such as the case of celebrity or expert endorsements.
Most campaigns create messages that are disseminated through various mass media. The particular media mix (i.e., choices about which media to use to carry campaign messages) depends on the campaign goals, media goals, target audiences, and resources of the campaign. For example, the campaign goal of spreading knowledge requires media that carry credible information that can be processed and reprocessed by the target audience (e.g., print media), whereas changing attitudes and behaviors is likely to require media that carry emotional appeals, allow for the modeling of appropriate behavior, demonstrate negative consequences of not following recommended changes, and permit repetition without redundancy (e.g., television).
Media goals specify the relative emphasis of wide casting (an emphasis on reaching as many people as possible using such media as newspapers and television) or narrowcasting (targeting specific audience members using media like magazines and radio). Media choices are also dictated by the choice of target audiences as campaign planners seek media vehicles that have relatively high concentrations of target audiences for efficient message placement. Finally, choices are guided by the more pragmatic constraint of available resources (e.g., radio is very inexpensive and magazines are very expensive; television has high absolute costs, but relatively low cost per thousand persons reached).
The Internet is a growing part of the media mix for most campaigns. As a tool to disseminate campaign information, the Internet offers many advantages over traditional mass media. It is relatively low-cost, permits the transmission of large amounts of information, and is driven by the needs and interests of the audience. The Internet also permits interactive, two-way communication. Moreover, and surprisingly, a high degree of credibility is accorded to the Internet as a source of information. Still, concerns about the “digital divide” in terms of access to online information mute this optimism. Beyond mass media, interpersonal message channels are important to engage because they are very influential: messages can be personalized and reinforced through the influence of primary groups, social ties, and opinion leaders. Many small business owners can attest to the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of word-of-mouth advertising. For these reasons and the fact that they represent two-way, interactive communication, interpersonal channels are particularly effective in most social change campaigns.
There has been much recent interest in buzz/viral marketing, the nonlinear spread of information throughout social networks. It may take the form of information spread from person to person, or the form of campaign messages (e.g., humorous video clips) that are passed on through digital networks. In part, the success of such techniques stems from their relatively low cost and the positive attitude of the target audience toward such messages, though whether they are effective or not requires more research.
Finally, there are the potential outcomes of a campaign. Some campaigns may promote radical social transformation, some minor incremental change, while others may seek to prevent change altogether. Regardless of the nature of social change sought, there are a variety of different perspectives on the nature of that change. More specifically, some campaigns may focus on inducing micro-level change in the form of altering the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals. Other campaigns may focus on macro-level changes including shaping social values and norms, while yet others may focus on changing institutional policies.
Scholars have been interested in the dissemination of knowledge and the use of persuasion to change attitudes and behaviors for quite some time, such that the literature is truly voluminous. Perhaps the most influential program for studying persuasion was laid out by researchers from Yale University in the 1950s (Hovland et al. 1953). Their influential research explored such message-related characteristics as source credibility, message appeals, substantiating arguments, incentives/sanctions, and the structure of argument presentation (i.e., one-sided vs two-sided messages). Their research contributed copious evidence on message effectiveness such as the findings that messages attributed to high-credibility sources are more persuasive, but that the credibility effect wears off over time in the absence of repetition, and that conclusive two-sided messages are better than messages that present only one point of view. They helped propagate the notion that one important key to promoting change in attitudes and behaviors is to present information that provides incentives for following recommended behaviors and sanctions for doing otherwise, something that is at the heart of most planned social change campaigns. Most importantly, their research set the agenda for decades for persuasion researchers from psychology and communication.
Research also suggests the importance of targeting social norms as part of social change campaigns. Social norms are opinions, attitudes, and behaviors that are considered widely shared within a given social system. In any system, there are incentives for conformity to social norms and sanctions for violating those norms. Such normative pressures exert a powerful influence on the public. Campaigns may take advantage of such pressures by invoking and reinforcing existing norms. They occasionally seek to create or change existing norms (e.g., the “5 a Day” campaign to increase fruit and vegetable consumption in the UK). While such campaigns ultimately seek to influence individuals, they focus on influencing norms (and the perception of norms) as key mediating factors. This type of orientation is reflected by Fishbein & Ajzen’s (1975) theory of reasoned action, which incorporates social norms into the relationship between attitudes and behaviors. Conceptualizing the influence of social norms, as well as attempting to influence norms as part of the campaign, is complicated by the fact that individuals are part of overlapping social networks, each of which may have its own set of norms.
The presumed influence model (Gunther & Storey 2003) provides a perspective on campaign effects that combines the influence of social networks and perceptions of social norms. In this model, when individuals encounter multiple campaign messages, they may make the assumption that other members of their social network are going to be affected by this campaign and thus make inferences about potential changes to social norms, which then has an effect on the individual’s attitudes and behaviors. For example, a teenager may witness anti-smoking ads and infer that other teenagers are going to be affected by the campaign and become less likely to smoke. Alternatively, this inference may be matched by another inference that such campaigns wouldn’t be necessary if smoking wasn’t prevalent among teens. This example points out a precarious position for campaigns with regard to the communication of social norms – competing inferences about the normative acceptability of the behavior in question. Which inference is more influential is likely to be moderated by perceived smoking prevalence among the individual’s immediate peer network.
While social networks and social norms can be powerful tools in social change campaigns, operationalizing them is inherently difficult. A more direct approach is to actually change organizational, community, and social policies. For example, social problems may be curtailed through public policy initiatives that include the application of incentives, sanctions, and usage impediments. Examples of such incentives would include tax breaks for hybrid cars and public financing for the development of alternative energy sources. Sanctions might include usage taxes and laws with fines for noncompliance. Examples of usage impediments would include indoor smoking bans, fuel efficiency standards, and licensing/regulation. While such policies are no doubt effective in regulating the behaviors of individuals and larger collectives, they also require complicity from within the power structure of any given system.
The history of planned social change in the social sciences is relatively long and variegated. A number of disciplines have made important contributions to the growth of knowledge in planned social change including psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and communication. Each of these disciplines has at some point also touched on mass media’s role in affecting social change.
The largest contributions of psychologists have been in the area of the role of motivation and persuasion in changing knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors at the individual level. In addition, psychologists were influential in early studies of the role of communication and mass media in producing such change. While the media have long played an important role in bringing about social change from religious reformations to revolutions, social science researchers have been studying the role of mass media in bringing about social change only since the middle of the last century.
One of the first systematic studies of mass persuasion was conducted during World War II in a series of research projects investigating the effect of the Why We Fight films that were designed to mobilize soldiers to fight against the Germans and Japanese. General George Marshall, who was the Chief of Staff of the US Army, engaged renowned Hollywood director Frank Capra to create a seven-film series designed to motivate American soldiers. Evaluation research conducted by a prestigious group of persuasion researchers hired by the government showed that the films were powerful in increasing soldiers’ factual knowledge, but that they had little effect on motivations and attitudes. Ultimately, this was an early study that provided evidence that campaigns designed to promote planned social change have an easier time influencing knowledge than they do shaping attitudes and behaviors. After the war, researchers involved in this project went on to conduct a long series of studies (known as the Yale Program of Research on Communication and Attitude Change) investigating factors related to using mediated message to promote attitude change.
For sociologists and economists, the aftermath of World War II was also a fruitful era for researchers studying planned social change, particularly in the area of promoting national development in developing countries. Researchers operating from the “modernization perspective” assumed that developing the economies of third world nations was a key to world stability. From this perspective, the mass media were seen as the “magic multiplier” in bringing information and motivation in order to mobilize individuals in developing countries in the process of modernization. In the development model, government and mass media were envisioned as a partnership in promoting the social good. The argument that media should play a central and coordinated role in promoting national development has often been used to justify government ownership (as opposed to private ownership) of the media. By the 1960s, the modernization perspective on national development began to draw criticism on a variety of fronts. Its assumptions were challenged as being ethnocentric and its conclusions were questioned by dependency theory (Cardoso & Faletto 1979), which argued that the developed nations through economic ties have engaged developing nations in exploitative relationships that leave them in a perpetual state of underdevelopment.
Sociologists have contributed knowledge regarding a key component in most conceptions of planned social change – social control. Most campaigns aimed at shaping individuals and their communities implicitly or explicitly recognize forces of social control. These forces operate through a combination of incentives that reward norm conformity and sanctions that punish deviance. These forces may be informal as in the case of public opinion and peer pressure, or they may be formalized in terms of laws and public policy. Many sociologists view the mass media, as primary sources of communication of social norms and the attendant incentives and sanctions that induce conformity, as social control agents. These ideas have implications for planned social change such that change agents often use media in the course of a campaign to do more than carry information and persuasive messages. The media can be used to convey or change social norms as well as to model rewards and punishments associated with them.
Another historical tradition in planned social change focuses on social engineering, a concept that comes from the political science discipline. Social engineering focuses on large-scale change (typically at the national level) in public opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Most often, this perspective focuses on the role of government as the primary change agent. Under this perspective, public policy, laws, and other governance strategies are considered primary directives of social engineering. There is a heavy emphasis on the incentives and sanctions that induce change, adopting the social control framework from sociology. Social engineering is facilitated by the tools of social science, which provide formative and evaluative research that guides the process of social change. Such change is promoted by the use of mass communication technologies, which convey policies and rules, and shape opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. The term “social engineering” has taken on negative connotations through its associations with various historical social engineering campaigns such as the propaganda campaigns and final solution from Nazi Germany and the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward campaigns in China.
Political science also provided early research on the role of propaganda as mass persuasion. Originally, the term was socially acceptable and used to describe attempts by government agencies (such as the Office of War Information, 1942–1945, and the Voice of America, founded in 1942) to influence the opinions and behavior of the public. Concerns about the negative effects of other countries’ use of propaganda during World War I, in communist revolutions, and the rise of Nazism motivated government interest in engaging political scientists in the study of propaganda effects (Lasswell et al. 1979). In the best-known example of propaganda research, Lee and Lee (1939) identified common techniques used by propagandists engaged in mass persuasion, which included such devices as glittering generalities, card-stacking, and name-calling. Like social engineering, propaganda has increasingly assumed negative connotations because of its association with brainwashing, indoctrination, disinformation, and psychological warfare, as well as its historical association with enemies of the United States. In reality, propaganda campaigns are simply a special case of planned social change for which the benefits and detriments of effects are in the eye of the beholder.
More recently, communication researchers have picked up the ball to advance research on planned social change. One of the earliest examples of research on social change by a communication researcher was a perspective on planned social change that was initiated in 1962 when Everett Rogers published his book Diffusion of innovations (Rogers 1962). The book helped launch a research tradition that examined the processes and influential factors that regulate the adoption of new technologies and practices in a given society. Rogers characterized the process of social change as a bell curve, in which innovations are in turn adopted by innovators, early adopters, early majority, majority, and laggards over a period of time. The theory viewed the process of innovation adoption as occurring through a series of stages including awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. The mass media may play a key role in each of these stages.
Many of the research traditions discussed in this section produced a considerable amount of social science research in their day, but at some point fell dormant. For many of these traditions, their decline was precipitated by the gradual recognition and resentment of ethnocentric assumptions implicit in their model of planned social change, that is, they are predicated on assumptions such as: if only other societies were more like us, they would be better off; or, our view of social change is right and their view of social change is wrong.
Current campaigns designed to foster planned social change are likely to employ a combination of mass, interpersonal, and interactive communication to achieve objectives, adopting many of the concepts and tools of advertising and public relations campaigns. Such campaigns revolve around defining objectives and situational constraints, creating strategic solutions, and executing them with an integrated campaign.
Campaign goals vary in terms of the degree of change sought from incremental modifications to revolutionary change. If objectives are overly ambitious, the campaign is likely to fall short of its goals and be deemed a failure. If the objectives are too modest, the agency footing the bill for the campaign may not feel that the campaign is worth the investment. Whether objectives are achieved depends on support from within the power structure, available resources, the degree to which incentives and sanctions can be invoked, and the cultural compatibility of the campaign.
Strategic decisions must be made about who to target, and how and when to target them with change efforts. Strategies may vary in the extent to which they emphasize coercion or merely seek the consent of the targets of change. Zaltman and Duncan (1977) provide a typology that organizes strategic approaches in to four categories. First, power strategies, which are on the coercive side of the continuum, involve changing laws, policies, economic incentives, and other relatively direct forms of control. Persuasion strategies tend to utilize communication media using a variety of different types of appeals to change audience knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations. Normative re-educational strategies are based on a more rational model of spreading information. Facilitation strategies rely on providing resources and opportunities to the public. Most campaigns opt for a mix of these strategies, the composition of which is based on a variety of factors including available time and resources, and the nature and degree of change sought.
The tactics used in a campaign depend in large part on the amount of resources that are available to the campaign. The use of mass-mediated advertising has the advantage of maximizing the change agent’s control over the campaign messages, but paid advertising is very expensive, and may not be a viable option for other than the well-endowed campaign. Some campaigns may seek to use public service announcements (PSAs), but PSAs have been on the decline lately as media outlets have become less concerned about demonstrating social responsibility. Organizations that seek to effect social change but don’t have the resources to pay for advertising may often resort to engaging news media through the use of press releases, events, or rallies. Reliance on news media involves risks, in part because the organization can’t control whether the media will show up to publicize the story, nor can they control the nature of the message. As many protest groups that seek to change the system have discovered, getting the attention of the news media can be very difficult. Often, such groups resort to the use of dramatic tactics (such as street theater and confrontations) to attract media attention. Unfortunately, for these groups the resultant coverage is often negative and their tactics can be used as criticism against them and their cause. This has led to the realization that any publicity may not be better than no publicity at all.
Many of the methodological issues and problems associated with attempts to study the effects of planned social change campaigns are common to research on media effects in general. It is difficult to isolate cause and effect. How do we know that the effects are the results of the campaign and not something else? At the individual level, it is difficult to manipulate exposure to the campaign or to measure the degree of exposure to the campaign. Some campaigns have tried to set up experimental and control communities to assess change in response to the campaign, but again it is difficult to isolate campaign effects (see Hornik 2002).
One limitation of most planned social change campaigns is that they are essentially pilot campaigns designed to test the viability of a given campaign approach. They may be limited in scope and in time frame, and as such never achieve systemic change. These campaign projects may show positive campaign effects, but implementing the campaign on a system-wide basis may not be feasible. Thus, such campaigns may not have a wide or a lasting impact.
The most promising areas for the future of research and practice in planned social change are how to most effectively apply the methods of strategic communication honed by advertising and public relations practitioners, and how to harness and evaluate the power of the Internet and other new media. As the tools of strategic communication and media message production become more widely available, it may be more feasible for organizations such as social movements to engage in social change campaigns. As they go forward with these initiatives, there are a few important lessons to bear in mind. The acceptability of social change goals is in the eye of the beholder. It is far easier to spread knowledge than it is to change attitudes and behaviors. Mass-mediated messages are more effective when combined with Internet support and interpersonal communication that utilizes existing communication networks and opinion leaders. And finally, change is most likely to occur among individuals who are motivated to process information and when it is consistent with personal values and social norms.
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