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Gisela Rots]: Welcome to our webinar today.
My name is Gisela Rots and I’ll be facilitating today.
You are on the webinar, ‘Why Is It So Hard to Talk About Prevention?”
And we are really excited to have with us today Dr. Mackenzie Price from Frameworks
Institute and we will be getting started in just a few minutes, at the top of the hour.
And while you are coming in and getting yourself situated, we welcome you to answer the two
poll questions that we have kind of at the top, middle, and right side of your screen.
Getting us to think about, when we tell people that we work in prevention, how do we describe
what we do?
What kinds of questions do people ask of us?
I just invite you to share with us how you maneuver that as people who work in prevention.
I know that I often struggle with that.
My own mom is always like, “Why do you work in the summer?
Don’t you work in the schools?”
So, I have done a great job sharing with my own mom the work that I actually do.
So, want to start to think about that a little bit.
Again, welcome everyone.
We are glad to see you all joining us.
If you are in the virtual room, that’s great.
We are happy you are here.
Hopefully, you can hear us.
You can listen to the audio through your computer speakers today.
That is absolutely wonderful.
If your connection is a little dubious or your having some issues, you may want to call
into the phone line that we have.
You will see it highlighted in purple on the bottom left-hand side of your screen.
That 888 number.
Again, your connection may not be very strong and you are concerned about getting disconnected
from the online component, we would encourage you to just call into that phone line as well.
And if you are joining us and you are sitting at a computer with multiple people joining
in one log-in, we’d really encourage you to share with us who is sitting with you in
the chat box.
So, that chat box is on the lower half of your screen in the middle and the right.
You can just enter in there who you are and who is sitting with you.
That also helps us to make sure that those folks get access to the materials afterwards.
You’ve probably joined us through our CAPT Connect system and all of the materials and
Certificates of Attendance will be in there after the webinar today.
So, we want to make sure everybody gets an opportunity to get access to that.
So, again, if there are more than one of you sitting around a computer, please let us know
who you are in the main chat box.
Of course, if you want to say “hi” we welcome that as well.
I see some folks filling out our poll.
Again, how do people describe what you do and what types of questions do they ask?
So, we are talking today about it being so hard to talk about prevention.
I’m seeing some great answers to this, so I love this, “A civil operator” or “working
with the community,” “Works for nonprofit and tries to get people to not become addicted
to opioids”, “Help people”, “Community Drug Prevention Coalition”, “Working with
kids around substance misuse”.
So, getting lots of answers along that spectrum and what types of questions folks ask.
These are really interesting.
“Does the work you do really make a community change?”
“What do you do again?”
“Is it needed?”
“Do you think you can make a difference?”
Right?
That ongoing - yes, the work we do does have outcomes.
“Is this like DARE?”
Right?
How often have we heard that?
“So, you are a social worker, right?”
Absolutely.
These questions I think they probably resonate for a lot of us so thanks for putting those
into the chat box.
Again, we will get started in just a moment, but we are really excited to have you all
join us today.
I’m seeing some folks tell us who they are and where they are from in the chat box, which
is wonderful.
Welcome to all of you.
Thanks for including, again, if there are more than one of you in a room, telling us
who you are so that we can make sure everybody gets credit and thanks for introducing yourselves.
We are seeing lots and lots of folks join us.
Someone from Puerto Rico.
Wow.
Jeannette, we hope you safe where you are and have not gotten hit too hard by the hurricane.
Certainly, keeping everyone in those parts in our thoughts.
Alright.
So, we are just going to give folks another moment or two to join.
Again, welcome to today’s webinar, “Why It Is So Hard to Talk About Prevention?”
We’ve got those two poll questions at the top.
We are seeing some wonderful answers to that and seeing that it runs the gamut in terms
of how people think about what we do and the kinds of questions that people ask.
That question around does prevention really work, right?
We get that often.
And I don’t know that we will quite get to how to talk about that, but I’m hopeful
that by the end of today we will have some good ideas about how we can help frame those
messages so we can better get our thoughts and our purpose across.
Certainly, a tall order, but I think we might be up for the challenge.
And so, we are seeing some more folks join in.
I’m just going to give us another minute before we actually launch into the webinar.
Thank you all so much for joining us.
We are really excited to see you all here and so actively engaged and I hope you continue
to do that throughout today’s webinar.
So, with that, I think I’ll go ahead and we will get started.
Again, welcome everyone.
We are really happy to see so many of you here today.
You are here for this webinar on “Why It Is So Hard to Talk About Prevention?
A Strategic Approach to Crafting Effective Messages.”
We are joined today by Dr. Mackenzie Price from Frameworks Institute and I will introduce
her a little bit more in just a moment.
My name is Gisela Rots.
I’m the team lead for the Northeast Resource Team of the CAPT.
Just really excited to see so many of you with us today.
I see you still being active in the chat box and I certainly encourage you to continue
doing that as we get started.
So, as with all of the CAPT webinars, we will be recording today and we will be archiving
it.
You will be able to retrieve that from your CAPT Connect page.
The materials will also be uploaded to that CAPT Connect page, so that is where you should
have registered for today’s webinar and where you actually went to before you joined
in.
If you have any questions or you had any problems with that, please do let us know.
Or if you got a link from some other source, please let us know so that we can make sure
we add you to the registrant list.
So, our presenter today, again, I’m really thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Mackenzie
Price.
Mackenzie is actually an Applied Sociolinguist and Associate at Frameworks Institute where
she focuses on research interpretation and application.
And, in her own words, she translates that as helping to translate expert perspective
on social issues to better engage the public.
I think that that really gets at some of the challenges that we have in prevention.
Mackenzie has a Bachelor’s from Stanford, Master’s Degrees from UC-Davis and Georgetown,
and a PhD from Georgetown and we are just thrilled is here with us today.
Mackenzie, do you want to say hello?
[Mackenzie Price]: Hi.
Good afternoon.
I am also thrilled to be here today and thank you for joining us.
[Gisela Rots]: Awesome.
Thanks, Mackenzie, and I will hand it over to you in just a few minutes.
I am, like I said, I’m Gisela Rots.
I’m the Team Leader or Coordinator for the Northeast Resource Team at the CAPT.
I’ve been here for about five years and worked in prevention at the community level
for quite a few years before that.
I’ve done a lot of community work and certainly in all of that have always been challenged
with this idea of how do we get our messages across.
And I will be facilitating here today, so as we go along, please, as we are talking,
feel free to type any questions you have in the chat box.
We will get at those as we are able.
In terms of our agenda today, we are going to begin with talking about framing or how
we present information and messages to the public.
We will talk a little bit about how the public thinks about substance misuse, looking at
cultural models as a frame for that.
We will talk about key elements of well-framed messages, right?
So, thinking about some of the tools that we might have in our pockets to use.
And we will also be talking about some components of evaluation to think about and we will have
some at the end today for questions and answers.
We will be doing some polls throughout the webinar today that we will ask you to engage
with and, again, if you have a question, please feel free to put it in the chat box.
I will make sure I capture that and when we have a pause in the presentation, we will
go ahead and try to answer some of those if we need to talk about them out loud, if we
are able to, we will certainly put some answers in the chat box as well.
So, we hope this is a two-way communication stream today.
So, before we really kick off our content, we are going to ask you to think back and
share and example of a prevention message that really resonated with you.
So, on the left-hand side of your screen, you see a short answer poll like we did in
the lobby that we were just in and we just ask you to share an example of a prevention
message that resonated with you.
If you’d like to share what you liked about it, what made it memorable, what made it persuasive,
please feel free to put that in the chat box which is on the right-hand side of your screen
and we will look forward to getting some answers in there.
Ah, “click it or ticket.
Simple, catchy, and to the point.”
Yes.
Absolutely, it’s very concrete for folks.
Thank you so much for that example and we will just give folks another moment or two
to give us some other examples.
Alright.
We’ve got “Above the influence.”
Maine Tobacco Stolen Moments.”
“We Need You Here--A suicide prevention message developed by youth.”
Great.
“Parents who host lose the most.”
“Be a parent, not a peer.”
“Fatal Vision.”
“Only you can prevent forest fires.”
Right?
So, we are getting some feedback around being truthful, not fear-mongering is really important.
Again, simple, catchy, and to the point in thinking about how our audience may interpret
these messages.
Awesome.
“Texting and driving…no one is good at it.”
Again, very simple and to the point and hopefully over the course of today Mackenzie will help
us understand how these messages might be good ones.
It’s a very catchy piece trying to put a good message together, which is why I think
it’s great to have a linguist onboard with us today.
Excellent.
Well, so thanks so much for sharing those with us and with that we will go ahead and
move back into the main room.
I am going to hand it over to you, Mackenzie, to take us through the next section.
[Mackenzie Price]: Alright.
Let’s get going.
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, again.
Thanks for joining us.
I am here at Frameworks HQ, as I like to call our office, and my colleagues, we are all
on a mission to help advance the nonprofit sector’s ability to talk and communicate
about social issues in a way that not only changes public discourse, but helps members
of the public think about how a social issue works in a way that’s more similar to the
way that experts and policymakers and advocates are thinking about that issue.
And so, to get us started on our framing journey, I want to spend a little bit of time laying
some groundwork, talking about why this notion of framing is really important for communications
and any communication strategy that one might be using.
So, frames are choices that we make as communicators about how we are going to present information.
It’s how we choose to explain something, what we emphasize, even what we don’t say.
All of those choices are part of the frames that we build.
And, we want to think about which frame, which choices are explaining something, work in
building not only understanding but sometimes support or a sense of efficacy with the public
in order to make our messages more effective.
But, we also know that looking at the impacts that different framing choices are going to
have, it’s an empirical question.
It’s something we can experiment with and test.
And what you see in front of you are some data that we gathered when we were looking
into how to communicate more effectively about child mental health policy.
So, specifically we wanted to find ways of talking about policies and practices that
support child mental health in ways that would make the public call for those policies and
services being enacted in their communities.
And so, we tried different value or different appeals we could use to explain why it’s
important to have programs and practices that support child mental health.
And what you see here is the effect that different reasons why these types of policies are important,
the effect that they have.
So, we tried a couple of different ways to advocate for child mental health policy.
We tried this is matter of prosperity, we need to move our society forward.
We tried ingenuity, we know how to support child mental health, so let’s do it.
We also tried prevention, so we can prevent a mental health and difficulty later on.
We tried vulnerability, young people are particularly vulnerable, need protection.
One of the ways we can protect them is through supporting child mental health.
In the survey experiment, when we compared those messages against folks who didn’t
get any message about why it’s important to think about child mental health, different
values got different levels of support for putting those services into place.
Ingenuity was the winner, so we know how to support children’s mental health.
Let’s do it.
Vulnerability, depressed support, which is not what we want to see happen, and prevention
didn’t really move the needle at all, so saying that this is something that we can
prevent was almost like saying nothing.
It was almost like not giving a reason for why we need to put child mental health services
in place.
And so, what this tells us is that different ways of explaining why something is important
are going to have different results and we can do experiments to see which direction
different ways of framing an issue are going to go.
So, at Frameworks we say a frame, or a way of explaining an issue, works when it moves
thinking in multiple ways.
We are looking for communication strategies that are going to build knowledge.
Today I’m going to be talking a lot about our work on adolescent substance use.
We want to build the public’s knowledge about this public health issue.
We also want to change public attitude so that people are able to see this is something
that we can work together to reduce, and we want to build support for specific practices
that are going to address adolescent substance use.
So, that might be something like getting people to support the idea that healthcare providers
could be required to screen for substance use, for example.
And so, what we are really all about is looking for those frames, or ways of explaining an
issue, that build public support for the specific policies, because we want to see practices
like having screening be widely available, something that the public supports.
And so, our theory of change that we apply to all of the issues that we work on is if
we can come up with ways of explaining or framing our issue and help advocates change
the way they talk about their issue, we can start to change the way the public talks about
the issue and the way the public even thinks that something like substance use works and
something like prevention works.
And if we can help people think differently about substance use and prevention, we can
build public will and engage the public in creating a society and enacting specific policies
that create the world that we want to see.
And so, we’ve been taking this approach to communications and approach to research
to a variety of issue areas not just substance use, and you can see some examples on the
screen right in front of you.
But, for today, we are going to be talking about our work in adolescent substance use
specifically and to get us a little bit closer to that work I want to make the case for why
we need to think about a communication strategy.
So, you know that you need to think really carefully about how you frame or explain your
issue a lot of the time, even all the time, but when a really specific event happens.
We call that event that “you say/they think problem.”
The poll question that we actually started the day with is a really great example of
a you say/they think problem so you say this is what I do and they think are you a DARE
officer, right?
So, you are saying something and you aren’t getting a response that indicates people are
really seeing how something like prevention works.
This problem is part of what is at the heart of why prevention can be so difficult to talk
about.
We’ve tried to talk about this in a variety of projects that we’ve worked on that touch
different aspects of health.
So, to give you some examples, some more examples, about what this “you say/they think” problem
sounds like, an expert or an advocate might say something like they are working in the
oral health area.
We know we can eradicate oral health problems through widespread prevention efforts like
fluoridation of water, for example, but what we hear and what we get back from the public
is, well yeah, we can eradicate oral health problems if people would just brush and go
to the dentist and then they wouldn’t have bad teeth.
So, in this example we said why we need to have prevention, what prevention can do, but
what the public is saying is still focused on individual solutions and individual behavior
and if we are trying to advocate for systemic change, we haven’t gotten to the public
in the way that we want to.
If we are talking about substance use, so we might want to talk about the fact that
experimentation is a serious issue that we have to pay attention to and we have to think
about early intervention services, but the response that we get back is experimentation
is risky, but is it this what young people do?
We don’t want them to go too far and drive drunk, but it’s a normal part of adolescence
and getting older.
What we are seeing here in this example is we want to focus, again, attention on early
intervention and prevention but we hear, well, it’s normal.
What are you going to do?
Why does this keep happening?
This is what touches off our research process and the reason this keeps happening is because
of that lovely green bubble right there that we call culture and by culture, I mean the
preexisting ways that the public is already thinking, talking about something like substance
use, but they already know about it, the way that they take in information about this topic.
That’s what is in that green bubble of culture.
What is useful about that is we can start to craft messages that take culture into account
and we can anticipate some of the ways that the public is thinking about an issue.
How are we able to anticipate?
Well, the answer is that we research it.
The first thing we want to do when we set out to think about how to frame something,
how to explain something like substance use really effectively is to go out and figure
out how people are already thinking and talking about it.
I think that this is a good moment to refer back to the prevention messages that we typed
in in the second poll question today.
I wrote down a few of the messages that you described as being most impactful and most
resonate.
Things like, “we need you to here”, something that was developed by a youth suicide field.
something like, “texting and driving…no one is good at it.”
So those two in particular stuck out to me and the reason they did is because both of
those are not just prevention messages.
They are actually responses to common thoughts, so the idea of “we need you here” is a
response to what might be what the prevention field might know is a common thought that”
well, maybe I don’t need to be here.”
So, the prevention message is responding to that pattern of thinking.
The same thing with “texting and driving…No one is good at it.”
The assumption might be, “oh, it’s easy.
Everyone can multitask.
I can do this.
It’s no big deal.”
And that slogan responds to that assumption, “oh, this is going to be fine.
I can be totally good at this.”
And so, I think it part of why those messages in particular, or messages like those, can
work so well it that they are responding to our culture or the ways that we are thinking
and talking about certain things.
And that’s my hypothesis about those two.
I haven’t experimented on them specifically.
But, this point that we can research and look into how the public thinks about a social
issue is a crucial part of framing and we like to think about public thinking about
any issue as a swamp.
And you’ve got to picture of a swamp right here.
So, you might have some preconceived notions about swamps, but let me tell you they are
interesting places because they are so complex.
Public thinking is complex as well.
So, if we think about a swamp we have to think about what’s inside of it.
It’s got trees.
You see some on the screen.
It’s got water.
All kinds of flora and fauna live in there.
All kinds of flora and fauna are a part of public thinking as well.
And some things inside of that swamp are totally, totally fine.
You, in fact, maybe want to, you know, go on a boat ride to go look at them.
Beautiful flowers, fresh air, perhaps you are bird watching.
You want to go see what’s out there.
But there are some things inside of a swamp that are not particularly helpful like alligators
or scary bugs or something like that.
And public thinking is the same way.
There are some assumptions about social issues and how the world works that can be really
useful for communicators and we can tap into those.
Those are the things like the beautiful flowers and the birds and the fresh air.
There are also some ways of thinking about social issues that we want to avoid at all
costs, like alligators.
And that is what looking into how the public thinks and talks about an issue becomes really
valuable for the process of reframing because if we can map out how the public is already
thinking and talking about something like substance use, we can get some clues into
how we can explain it.
We will know what assumptions maybe are shared with the advocacy community and we want to
leverage or capitalize on and we will know what ways of thinking are completely divergent
or not helpful.
Those alligators that we want to avoid before they come and eat us.
We just want to get out of there.
So, the first step of our reframing journey is figuring out how people already think and
talk about an issue like substance use.
so those patterns of thinking about an issue are what we call cultural models.
So, these are the habits, the shortcuts we use to think about an issue and they are important
to know because these are assumptions that we use to interpret new information.
when any communicator is putting information out there about a social issue folks are coming
to it with these preconceived assumptions, preconceived ideas about how an issue works
in their minds and if messages only reinforce those unproductive ways of thinking, we are
not going to shift public opinion and public support and that’s really what we are after.
So, a part of our research on substance use starts with the idea of mapping out what are
the assumptions the public has about this issue, so we go out, all over the country
and interview everyday people about an issue like substance use to get a picture of how
people are already thinking about it.
Are there ways of thinking about it that align with the advocacy community? where are the
gaps, where are the disalignments? we want to know all of those.
So, what I’d like to show you now is just a clip of the interviews that we did at this
stage of our research process so I’m going to play about a minute and a half of video
and what you will see are clips from different interviews that we’ve done with everyday
people talking about adolescent substance use.
So, I will show you a little bit and then we will move on.
I would also like to note that if you are using your computer speakers to listen to
today’s presentation you are going to need to turn them on.
The audio will not come through our phone line.
So, again, if you are listening through your computer you need to turn your speakers on
to hear this video.
[Video]: “What comes to mind when I mention adolescent substance use?”
“Curiosity”; “Curiosity”; “I think they all want to experiment”; “I think
people want to experiment and see”; “Probably the majority of young people have experimented
with alcohol or other drugs”; “Lots of adolescents try out substances”; “I think
it’s common for almost all adolescents to at least try them”; "It’s pretty prevalent.
It’s hard to think about anyone who hasn’t experimented with something”; “Rebellious
feelings”; “Told not to do it.
people always want to do things you’re not supposed to do”; “The constant nagging
to not do it almost makes them want to do it more”;
“What do you think might explain why some adolescents might use drugs and alcohol and
others might not?”
“Maybe to escape reality?”; “Sometimes it’s an escape from pressures that they
feel”; “I feel like a lot of people use it as an escape”; “A form of escape”;
“They might be trying it just as an escape”; “Sometimes it might be to relieve anxieties
that they have”; “You might be troubled and it helps you feel better about yourself”;
“Maybe it’s a deep emotional thing.
Maybe it gives them relief?”; “Make you forget.
Make you happier.
Make you feel more popular”; “And also, maybe peer pressure”; “I think a big part
of it is peer pressure”; “Some of it can be peer pressure”; “I guess it’s all
the crowd you hang with”; “You have all your friends doing it so you just want to
do it too.”
[Mackenzie Price]: Okay.
So, you’ve heard just a little clip of a collection of interviews
that we’ve gone out and done with folks to get a sense of how they talk about substance
use, what they know about it, what they say about it.
We do this and we collect all of these interviews and analyze them in order to come away with
what we think of as a map, so to speak, of the swamp of adolescent substance use.
We want to know what is in that collection of public thoughts and assumptions about substance
use.
And we learned a couple of really key things and you may have heard some of them in that
video.
Some of these cultural models really give us a roadmap for what we need to craft new
messages and new ways of talking about substance use to counteract.
You should be able to see a lovely green cursor.
One of the cultural models that -- a collection of cultural models that we see about substance
use is that it’s totally natural, it’s totally acceptable, it’s inevitable.
You can’t stop it and it’s dangerous.
So, these ways of thinking about substance use come through in the interviews that we
do and want to know what the public knows and thinks about substance use.
We also are interested to hear what the public thinks about adolescents and young people
in general.
So, one of the things that we often hear is that adolescents are young people and this
is the time in their life when they are taking risks, but they need to take risks within
reason.
We also hear that when folks are thinking about adolescents they think about adolescents
within the family and by that, I mean they think about only parents as being responsible
for what adolescents do.
That’s what we mean by this concept of a family bubble.
What’s interesting is that sometimes that bubble gets perforated so by that sometimes
people can talk about other folks who have an impact on young people’s lives, maybe
teachers or healthcare professionals, but, generally, when we are talking about young
people folks attribute everything that is going on to them to their parents and that
can sometimes be limiting because we know that young people exist in other context besides
what’s just happening in their home.
And another important thing to think about in our work trying to figure out what the
cultural models around adolescent substance use are is that there’s a strong, strong
expectation that young people who don’t use substances are young people who have willpower
and are just, through some innate force, able to make better choices and do things differently
than other young people and in thinking like that there isn’t a lot of room for protective
factors or prevention even because we are attributing everything to people’s innate
abilities.
We also see a deep sense of fatalism and that’s connected to the idea that substance use is
natural, so if it’s natural there is nothing you can do about it, why would you want to
do anything about it, it’s going to happen anyway.
And that’s, of course, something that we want to move away from.
So, as the first part of our framing, think about how people are already thinking and
talking about an issue like substance use and some of what we learn is that people think
it’s dangerous but it’s natural.
There’s not a lot you can do about it.
It’s young people who are going to not use substances.
They better have some kind of innate ability and their parents are probably to blame anyway.
So, with that in mind, I’m going to move to our first question of the day.
[Gisela Rots]: Awesome.
Thanks, Mackenzie.
That was a lot of information and really good.
We are, as Mackenzie said, we are just going to pause and do a little bit of thinking about
these cultural models.
I see folks are right quick out of the gate.
What we’ve got is this idea of which cultural models or assumptions about adolescent substance
use are active in the example on your screen?
So, I’ll read it out.
“It is common knowledge that the drinking age in the United States is 21.”
However, by age 13, one-third of boys and about one-fourth of girls have tasted alcohol.
Even scarier, excessive alcohol consumption leads to more than 4300 deaths annually among
people under 21.”
Is this a cultural model that identifies substance use an escape, as a social pressure or that
use is normal and use is dangerous?
And I see folks filling out the poll.
We’ve got about 70% of participants who are saying use is normal and use is dangerous.
And we’ve got a couple of folks sharing that they think substance use is an escape.
A few more who think that it’s around social pressure.
We got some folks still filling it out, so I will just for a moment to let folks finish
up.
Alright.
It looks like we are landing on 75% of us thinking that use is normal and use is dangerous.
Mackenzie, what do you think?
[Mackenzie Price]: Yes.
Well, that is what I think also and let me tell you why.
So, one thing that’s really key to cultural models and I should have mentioned this before
we started this poll question is that this is an important part of communication because
the way we explain our issue can, in people’s minds, trigger these cultural models.
So, when I’m reading or anyone is reading a paragraph like this, I’ve got the idea
that, well, those people use substances because it’s such a pressure and I’ve got the
idea that they do it to escape and that’s it normal.
All of these ideas are floating around in my head and I can call on any of them to think
about substance use, but there’s going to be language out there, messages that is going
to latch onto some of those cultural models and I think there’s a lot of language in
this example that is going to latch onto that use is normal, use is a dangerous way to think
about substance use and maybe even reinforce it.
So, the language that I see as calling up or making a cultural model active is talking
about common knowledge, so that helps me say, “oh yeah, it’s normal.”
Thinking of language like scary and excessive and talking about how many deaths have been
annually, that lets me think, “yep, it’s dangerous.”
So, a paragraph like this might be trying to do something else that might be helping
me think about prevalence.
It might be, you know, an introduction to a totally different idea.
There is language in here that lets me rely on the ways I’ve already thinking about
this issue so it lets me keep thinking, “yep, it’s normal.
Yep, it’s dangerous.”
And the fact that these are the ways that we are accustomed to talking about substance
use that’s part of what makes prevention just so hard to reframe because that’s a
really dominant way of thinking, but the good news about -- or actually, let me hold off
and hand it back to you to close us out.
Gisela?
[Gisela Rots]: You were getting all excited.
I love it.
[Mackenzie Price]: I was.
[Gisela Rots]: That’s great.
Well, no, that’s really helpful and I think part of what I’m hearing you say is that
we have to be really cognizant of the language that we are using and those words that stick
out that will resonate more strongly with people.
So, we will move back into the main room right now and just before I hand it back over the
Mackenzie I will just remind folks, if you have questions please do feel free to stick
them in the chat box.
We will have a couple of more opportunities today to pause and answer questions that are
coming up and we certainly, you know, if you want to revisit something we can do that as
well.
I recognize this is a lot of information in a slightly different frame.
That we often use and I think that might be that, as we continue to dive deeper, some
more questions from the initial content might come up as well.
So just encourage our participants to feel free to use that chat box for that.
And with that, I will hand it back over to you.
[Mackenzie Price]: Okay, thank you.
And so, the exciting part of what’s important to keep in mind about cultural models and
by that, I mean keep in mind how people already think about your issue, is that people can
think about any issue in multiple ways.
So, as I’ve talked about before, things like “use is normal, use is dangerous, social
pressure.”
Those are all different ways of thinking about substance use.
They are all available to us as members of our society, so there are multiple ways to
think about it, but some ways of thinking are more productive than others.
Now, unfortunately, those three I named I would say none of them are particularly productive,
but they can be useful ways of thinking about how an issue works that we want to try and
identify and we want to choose language that latches onto those ways of thinking that are
useful.
Or we want to avoid using language that would latch onto an unproductive cultural model.
So, I would want to avoid language like scarier, even scarier, excessive use, etc.
I would want to avoid language like that because that’s what is going to latch onto this
idea that “use is normal,” “use is dangerous” and so that’s why thinking about and researching
how folks are already talking about an issue is really important.
And so, once we’ve done that, the next step in framing is really using what we know to
build messages that are more effective.
And so, for the rest of today’s presentation, I want to walk you through a couple of approaches
that we have experimented with to building effective messages related to substance use
and to preview some strategies that we’ve got “in the oven”.
We are in the process of developing more strategies and more recommendations to talk more effectively
about substance use.
And all of these approaches that one would take the way you frame substance use, those
are always going to respond to the way people already think and talk about it.
Either it gives you a new way to think or help you keep thinking in a positive way.
So, what makes a well-framed message?
And here are some four general points.
So, as I said, a well-framed message is one that responds to the way that folks already
think and talk about an issue and it dislodges or avoids or moves away from unproductive
assumptions about substance use.
Like the idea that use is inevitable and there is nothing you can do.
We want to move away from that idea in all ways, at all times, so that’s one way to
respond to cultural models’ research.
The other things that we want to do to craft a well-framed message are explain to people
why it’s important to speak about this issue and different values, thinking about why an
issue is important is a big part of communications related social change more generally.
So, if the public doesn’t know a lot about substance use and prevention in the way that
experts do, a good first step is letting them know why this is important and why it’s
something that they need to focus their attention to.
A well-framed message is also going to fill in some dots.
So, we said that the public maybe doesn’t have as thorough of an understanding of how
substance use and misuse works, how prevention functions to change outcomes.
There are some pieces of information that we can fill in in our messages so that this
connection between prevention and outcomes and health becomes clearer for people and
well-framed messages can be a way to deliver that information.
And we also want to build a sense that, yes, this is something we can do.
There are things we can do about an issue like substance use without relying on a crisis
tone.
This one is tricky because we know that crises are very real and we see them quite acutely
and when I say be careful of relying on a crisis tone, what we really want to build
and what crisis tone can attempt to build is, yes, a sense of urgency, but also a sense
of efficacy.
If we can pair those to say this is very important, here is what we do about this.
It’s that combination that makes a well-framed message.
But without the second part of efficacy, we’ve just left a message kind of by itself, if
you will, and without a sense of what to do to address a problem, we haven’t created
a roadmap, so to speak.
So, it’s important to pair urgency with a sense of efficacy and if we can do that,
if we can connect the dots and say this is why this matters, we are on the road to creating
a well-framed message.
So, the first step of this well-framed message are values.
Values are these broad categories, they are ideals, things that we can agree are important,
if you will.
One of the things we do are test different values.
So, the graphs we’ve looked at earlier that showed the impact of ingenuity and vulnerability
and prevention as reasons why child mental health supports and services were important.
That was a values experiment.
So, we were trying those different ideas and an explanation for why these matter so that’s
an example of what we mean by value.
so, you saw in that experiment that prevent as a value, so we can do something about this,
that’s why we can do something about this early, that’s why we should do this.
It was as successful as other messages, so that experiment is relevant to that child
mental health work, but one of the things we are trying to do in our research in substance
use is that prevention is a useful value and to be honest the results are kind of mixed.
So, when we present something it’s important to think about adolescent substance use and
misuse because it can be prevented and prevention is an important part of addressing adolescent
health problems and if we don’t address them, then problems are going to get worse
over time.
If we use an explanation like that we find that we can get people to think about and
support early intervention and we can get people to have conversations about early intervention
as a good thing, and this is something that specifically comes up, because it saves money
for our healthcare system in the long-term.
that’s the type of conversation that prevention inspires in some of the experiments that we
do, but prevention, as a value, doesn’t do everything.
It doesn’t get people away from the idea that substance use is natural so people think
it’s going to happen anyway, right?
And that’s not necessarily what we want to see.
Another limitation is that using prevention as the value in messages about substance use
still let’s people say it’s all about family.
So, families are the folks who are responsible for prevention efforts, for example, and if
our ultimate goal is to do something like expand access to care, expand access to screening,
and the public is still attributing all of this prevention work to families, then we
can’t get people to embrace the idea that screening, for example, should be more widely
available.
So, prevention can do some things, but not all of the things that we need to do.
And another thing related to that screening point, is that in our experiments, we weren’t
able to get people to see that medical settings, for example, were an appropriate place to
address substance use and I think that relates to this family problem that prevention as
a value in these experiments still found people focusing on families and when that was happening
it shut out other places, other relationships, other contexts, other settings as a part of
the prevention landscape for young people.
If we are trying to broaden that landscape and not narrow it, prevention as a value isn’t
doing the kind of work that we wanted to do.
So, what do we do about that?
One of the things that we tried is to pair prevention with other values as well and just
to use that to steer conversations in a different direction.
So, you’ve got two examples of some of the values that we are thinking about and using
prevention with also.
So, some of them are going to look familiar, ingenuity or innovation, so we can tackle
a challenging problem by looking for new methods and we can use those as a part of our prevention
efforts and talking about public health as something that is important to all of us and
that’s our value.
So, if we see this has a health problem and respond accordingly, that’s important and
prevention can be a part of our response.
That’s one of the ways we are working to see if can pair prevention with other values.
The core lesson here is that anytime you are building an effective message you have to
give people a reason why this is important.
Prevention alone does some things and not other things and we can pair this idea that
there is something we can about this and we need to do something early with other values
to try and build understanding of what our work is.
So, my next tip or idea, for thinking about talking and framing more effectively and building
effective messages is thinking about your messages’ explanatory power.
By that I mean how it goes about filling in the dots about an issue, what language is
in your message that’s helping someone understand not just why prevention is important, but
what examples of prevention are, what they do, why this is an important solution or approach
to a public health problem and how prevention connects to the kinds of positive outcomes
that we want to see.
So how we can fill in language that does some of that work is a part of this idea of considering
your messages’ explanatory power.
And to get us started about that, we have our next poll question.
So, what you see on the screen in front of you is a little clip of just an ad about smoking
cessation and that might have been a spoiler alert to tell you what this ad is about, but
what I’d like you to do is rate or think about this image’s explanatory power and
really.
I’m just curious about your reactions here, so if you read this out loud to yourself it
says “stronger lung means longer walks” and we see two people walking and then there’s
a little information about quitting smoking and a number you can call down at the bottom.
When you see this, how explanatory do you think that it is?
So, does it clearly explain the connection between stopping smoking or smoking cessation
and how do you see a connection which you might fill in more information if it was up
to you?
Or, is your reaction “are they trying to say something about walking?”
I’m curious about what your reactions to this are.
Okay, so it looks like most people are seeing that they would fill in a little bit more
information if it was left up to them and there are some folks who, about a quarter,
who are saying, yep, the connection is clear here.
So again, I’m just curious to see what other folks have to say.
And we’ve got an excellent point here that we are answering this question with a little
bit of bias because we are preventionists.
Yes, that is an important part of how we would think about an image or a message like this.
So, a particular audience is able to fill in from information just by virtue of their
professional background and how they think about an issue.
That’s an excellent point.
Let me tell you a little bit about how I think about this message.
If I were to just read it as “stronger, longer walks”, what I see here is that,
and this point came up before, it is making some assumptions about what we know about
maybe health, what we know about cigarettes, what someone is reading about this knows even
about breathing.
To analyze and deconstruct the knowledge that you have to bring to something like this in
order to come away with it thinking that, “if I quit smoking, I will have, perhaps,
better functioning lungs.
They are stronger, so I will have more cardiovascular abilities and I can then take longer walks.”
It’s interesting to think about the steps that someone would have to make to interpret
a message and then to act on it, so to call this number and quit smoking.
So, this process of thinking, well, what do people have to know to think about see this
piece of communications the way I do as an interesting activity and that I think is part
of reviewing or thinking about how a piece of communication is explaining something or
its explanatory power.
And it’s also important to think about communication’s goal with respect to an image like this.
I don’t have any information about, you know, the success in this campaign or smoking
rate specifically, but this might be very effective in that this campaign, you know,
by a different evaluation measures coincided with reduced rates of smoking or increased
rates of doing smoking cessation programs.
For example, that may well be true, but you might have a totally different communication
goal.
So, it might be the case that you are an advocate, someone who is trying to build support for
more public parks and more public spaces where people can walk in a neighborhood and you
want to talk about how more green space is a part of prevention and a part of public
health.
If that’s what you are trying to do, then there are some more dots and some more information
that you would need to add into this message and fill in to meet the goals of what you
are trying to do.
So, thinking about what information is here, what information does someone have to bring
this message, all of this is a part of thinking about the ways we are explaining and the ways
we are explaining is really framing.
That’s what it is all about.
The next thing that I want to talk about is this concept of placing facts in a frame.
And this is just a little bit of time in this presentation to think about how we use facts
and data because that’s an important tool that we have as communicators and as a part
of building messages that we are putting out there.
So, the example that you see on the screen and on the green side is what we would describe
as being framed “with facts.”
So, it is just a paragraph that’s got some stats in there about the prevalence of use
of different substances for teens and it is just presenting that information.
It’s important to think about how data is being used in effective messages because we
know that statistics by themselves are not explanatory and we know that audiences use
their dominant assumptions to think about statistics.
One of the ways we know this is a part of our research process is to bring folks together
in settings that are similar to focus groups, but into group settings, and we give them
different statistics and talk about different statistics with them and ask them to respond
to those facts.
One of the things that we see across issue areas is that when you just give folks a paragraph
like this with statistics but no other context, the first reaction is to try and find a way
to explain away why this happened.
In our work on substance use, the top explanations are “well, it’s natural for kids to drink
alcohol or try marijuana or try smoking, so no wonder you are seeing data like this.”
Again, that’s the thinking that we know we want to get away from.
Statistics by themselves don’t shift thinking about substance use as something that can
be prevented.
They keep thinking right where it is and so you need to place statistics and data within
an additional frame connected to a value, explain what’s going on in this data, connect
it to the idea that prevention is something that we can actually do so that people can
start interpret data differently.
Here’s an example of how you could go about reorganizing or reframing the same set of
statistics in order to frame it up a little bit more.
The first thing that we want to do or the first thing that happens in this new example
is we are talking about substance misuse as a problem that we can solve, so we are building
a sense of efficacy right from the beginning.
We are talking about taking steps to prevent substance use in green.
Around the middle, we are talking about specific activities, protective factors, so things
that can decrease likelihood.
That’s the kind of language that recasts these activities of something that’s related
to prevention and talking about specifically what it does.
It decreases the likelihood that there is going to be substance use.
And the language down at the bottom also in green -- let me grab my handy little cursor
arrow, our communities don’t have to take these kinds of rates for granted.
Increasing the level of organized time with adults can make a difference.
So, we’ve got a clear appeal here to say there is something we can do about this.
We don’t have to just sit here and do nothing.
There are steps we can take, so we are really emphasizing a sense of efficacy and that is
part of how we are adding factors to our message about prevention, not just leaving prevention
all alone.
So, we’ve been on this theme the whole time, but how have we tried to think about ways
we can explain how prevention works?
My last area.
So, one of the ways we can do this, in this example, is to just add a little bit more
language and get a little more specific.
On the green side, you’ve got some text that we might start with.
So, we are joining forces of other advocates statewide to make drug and alcohol prevention
and counseling widely available to young people.
Well, we can make this a little more explanatory.
So, we can say that our advocates are working together to help young people reach their
full potential.
That’s a values appeal, so we’ve tacked on the value at the front of reaching full
potential into value by making supports for well-being more available.
We want to remove barriers to treatment and that starts with early detection and screening
and if we do this, more of our youth and families will have greater access to help care practitioners
and we can catch problems early on.
So, we’ve added some crucial pieces to this example.
We started with value and we talked really specifically about pieces of a prevention
landscape, so removing barriers to treatment, early detection, early screening, make sure
people have access to healthcare practitioners because all of that is a part of how we catch
problems early on.
So, again, I’m curious about how you would use this reframed text that we’ve developed.
What kinds of programs/ideas, what could you use this kind of language to talk about?
Sorry, Gisela, I might have stolen your thunder.
[Gisela Rots]: No, you are great.
I’m happy to give you an opportunity to catch your breath because you’ve walked
us through an awful lot.
While we kind of sit back and think about how we might use this introduction, so, as
Mackenzie read out, we have a reframed explanation of what we do and what you have on the right-hand
side of your screen is just a short-answer pod.
And, again, just asking you to think a little bit about how you might use this introduction
in your communications.
Either where you might integrate it, how you might use it within your community or within
thinking about how to roll out certain strategies.
Asking you to think a little bit strategically about how something like this that has these
laid out values and kind of broken down some of those barriers, worked against some of
that and the inevitability.
Really like image, right?
Protective factors built up to bring down that inevitability.
It’s a really powerful image.
We see folks thinking about this.
We see media campaigns, presentations in schools and town hall meetings, and using this kind
of an introduction as a way to engage new stakeholders collaboratively.
Right?
And explaining that it’s not just kind of one group working on it.
Right?
That’s the other piece that’s really cool about this network of advocates.
As you start to think which words kind of resonate and stick around.
That’s a really powerful image.
Seeing other people talk about using this as a way for capacity building to show established
collaboration.
It’s not just one group.
It’s really about collaboration.
So, we are seeing a lot of this opportunity to show the impact we have because we are
working on this together.
That collaboration piece which is so important in prevention work.
Someone says, “Explain what is prevention work.”
Yes.
Absolutely.
This becomes, like I’m thinking about elevator pitches, and those kinds of things and how
we can integrate this into some of those opportunities.
Target parents with this message.
Demonstrate that it is a community problem, right?
Which makes me think, Mackenzie, actually that there’s a community solution.
[Mackenzie Price]: Exactly.
We are getting really, really great responses here and the sense that it’s not an individual
problem or solution, it’s a community problem or solution is exactly what we are trying
to get at and we’ve got some really good ideas.
For example, this idea that you could break it apart into three pieces and then try to
illustrate each one.
I love that idea and I think you’re tapping into the way we at the office kind of put
this together, so we do see three ideas here.
First, full potential as a value.
Second, the image of removing barriers to treatment as a way to increase access.
And then the last piece, talking about what it is what people need access to and getting
really, really specific.
I could, you know, nerd out on this all day.
But, what you are seeing here is a combination of different ways we’ve developed for talking
about well-being in general and applying them to explaining what prevention does.
It’s can be about access to important resources and we are doing this because getting people
connected to those resources is good in the long run.
[Gisela Rots]: And, Mackenzie, I’m wondering if you can comment.
There’s someone who says that this feels a bit jargony and who is in that work of advocates
and what are the supports for well-being, how would you respond to that?
[Mackenzie Price]: I would say that you are pointing out exactly what we can continue
to explain.
So, our network of advocates could definitely be swapped out for agency X and Y, for our
county or our community.
So, you can swap that out with something else to communicate this idea that someone is working
to help young people reach their full potential and our network of advocates, you are right,
that is a jargony phrase, but that can be changed to say who is doing this work, certainly.
And the—lost that comment earlier.
Oh right, supports well-being.
So that’s also an opportunity to talk about perhaps what specific program, what service
is helping people reach their full potential.
That also can be made more specific.
The way this is written now it’s supposed to be very general and generic so it can be
customized to reflect an actual program or initiative or piece of a prevention landscape.
It’s customizable and, you are right, it you were using this in your work, you would
want to make this your own in some of those ways.
[Gisela Rots]: Awesome.
So, in the interest of time, I think we will move back to the main room, but there was
a question that popped up for you, Mackenzie, that I’m wondering whether you would feel
like you could answer right now.
And it was put in the chat box by Mallory.
She says that “in the prevention world we are told that how we explain things, so in
media campaigns, presentations, information sheets, but what’s the best way to word
some of these things?
Is it better to do it from the perspective of a prevention specialist?
As a counselor?
Or as some other kind of community person?”
Any thoughts on that?
[Mackenzie Price]: I do.
And that’s a great question because it is really-- you can think about this as kind
of an evaluation question.
So, thinking about who you are talking to and who you are using as a messenger, so who
is going to be delivering messages, are important choices.
What I would say is that if it’s a prevention specialist versus a counselor, for example,
they might be kind of the specifics, if you will, about how talking about their work maybe,
so the specifics of how what they do gets more access to things that if done early on
make a difference like detection and screening.
The mechanics of how what they do creates more access, those are, of course, going to
change and so depending on who you are you might talk about different things, but that
theme of “I am a part of what connects people to the resources that are part of their health”.
That seam could be constant across different messengers or different folks that you are
talking to and trying to reach.
So, I can’t say that I have a box of specific language for different professionals that
I can recommend to you in that way, but, your question is right on the money in terms of
you want to think about how different people can express this idea that we want to catch
things early on that help us reach our full potential.
Things like that.
You want to think about how different messengers might express that in their own voice and
see if that works.
That is something that’s important to think about.
[Gisela Rots]: That was really helpful and I see Mallory is typing again.
Thanks for explaining that and kind of helping us to think about how we talk about things
is just as important as the messengers who are delivering those messages.
So, in the interest of time, Mackenzie, do you want to move forward and I’ll kind of
go through some of the chat box and next time we pause we can pull some of those in again?
[Mackenzie Price]: Yes.
Absolutely.
So, the last area that I want to talk about is a little bit of the work that we’ve got
in progress.
One of the things that we are doing as a part of our work in reframing how substance use
is talked about and how we advocate for different parts of the prevention landscape is to find
effective metaphors or analogies that we can use to help people understand substance use
and how that works.
We are working on this quite literally as we speak.
What’s interesting though is that in Canada-- so a lot of work that we do is location-specific.
So, we have work in Canada where we were trying to help a group of advocates and scientists
there think about how they could explain in their words, “addiction and addiction services”
and so we developed this metaphor of redirecting the river and how that’s one way to talk
about their approach to effective treatment.
So, let me add that this is research that we did in Canada, I can’t advocate for this
specific metaphor for a US context, but if you want to read more about this study, that
again was done in Canada, you can find this information on our webpage.
What’s interesting about this is we found that we could use this concept of changing
the flow of a river to talk about prevention.
It was really, really effective because what the key here was that if you want to change
the direction of something like a river, you’d better start early and if you don’t start
early, it’s definitely going to be harder to change the course.
That built this understanding for the key aspect of prevention that we were trying to
get at.
And, another thing that was really interesting about this is if we talked about treatment
services in this way, changing the course of a river, we could also get people to say,
“well, it probably takes a lot of people working together to do something that major
and treatment and prevention work the same way”, which is exactly what we wanted to
help people see.
So, it takes a pretty big team of professionals working together to change the direction that
a river is going in and prevention is the same way.
We need a lot of people who are well-trained, working together to start early.
They can try and do it later on, but it’s going to be a lot harder.
So, this is a way of using an analogy to talk about the importance of preventive services
that worked in one context and we want to see if we can develop a metaphor or an analogy
as strategy for talking about use and prevention that works with similar efficacy here in the
United States, so stay tuned for that.
We are working on it.
All of this is really important in tandem with the idea of reviewing our messages, taking
a step back, looking at the communications we are putting together, and thinking about
what makes them effective, how can we help them be more effective, and are we doing anything
that’s decreasing their efficacy?
Again, if we think way back to the beginning of this presentation when we looked at that
green graph for child mental health supports, there were some elements of a message, some
value that boosted people’s willingness to support access to mental health services
and some ways of framing that idea that suppressed support.
So, in reviewing our messages, we can even go back and think about is there anything
in here that’s not going to help people think about prevention in the way that I want
them to?
And this is another place where we can use cultural models as a tool.
The first thing I would say we can do in thinking about messages and how they might be interpreted
by the public is looking for different pieces of languages just aren’t productive.
So, in the same way that were able to identify that that text about 4,300 young people lose
their lives, the same way that we were able to identify that that language lets people
keep thinking that use is dangerous, we want to look for other cues like that and move
away from them.
And these are some examples of some pieces of language that we could move away from because
they might let people keep thinking about use as natural, young people as vulnerable,
you only overcome this if you are strong, and you can get through the battle, and looking
inside yourself.
We want to move away from some of that and we can think about the language that we are
using and make sure we are not creating opportunities for thinking to latch onto those unproductive
cultural models.
There are some other frame elements we can look at to review our messages.
I would recommend thinking about the tone the messages take and this is where we get
back to the point about pairing efficacy (there is something we can do about this) with urgency
(this is a serious problem).
Efficacy and urgency by themselves are not as effective as they are together, so we encourage
advocates to use them together.
We should also make sure that we are letting people who are coming across our messages
know why our work is important.
We have to make sure that we are helping people understand why this is something we need to
think about.
One of the things that we know prevention as the reason, just as the value, so substance
use is something that our society needs to think about because of prevention, right?
That message by itself starts some productive conversations, but it doesn’t do all of
the work that we want to see, so maybe we can pair the idea that we can get in early
and effect change with some other values or some other ideas to help people understand
how this really works.
And then explanatory language.
So, filling in dots and connections and helping people understand who is a part of this network
for advocates?
What services and supports are actually being provided?
How do they work?
Who are the people who are making sure that we have access to healthcare settings or different
parts of prevention landscape?
What are those details and are we telling people what those details are and who is involved
in this important work?
All of that is a part of being explanatory and explanatory language.
And I think we’ve touched on some of this before that we want to pair prevention with
other ideas so we know that we can’t just leave it alone, but we have to talk about
it with other values, talk about how it works, etc.
And so, I want to close out by thinking about reviewing messages.
So, we know what can make them effective.
Anticipating how people think about an issue, removing unproductive cues, not just emphasizing
urgency, but pairing that with efficacy.
We know how we can review our messages, but if we are thinking about communications strategy
more broadly we can also, of course, review and evaluate that.
Now, different organizations might be taking different communication strategies but framing
or how you explain and talk about an issue like substance use is a part from any communication
strategy.
We are always framing.
We are always making choices about how we explain an issue.
So, these principles of making sure we are avoiding unproductive thinking and explaining
how something works, all of that, is a part of any communications strategy.
Everyone frames.
Everyone -- all strategies can take these points into account.
And as some final thoughts on how one might review communications and really think about
evaluating their efficacy.
Of course, the name of the game is you got to measure and you got to plan to measure.
If you have specific communications goals or specific goals once you arrive at them,
you want to build in time to check in on those goals along the way and think about what real
indicators of progress you are interested in and those could be different things for
different organizations.
This is a point that we touched on a little earlier, but remember that part of reviewing
the efficacy of messages and even part of evaluating a communication strategy more broadly,
should also involve thinking about who and what the messengers are.
So how are messages even getting out there?
We say that messengers, who delivers information, is a part of the frame and in some experiments,
they do, in some issues we work on, we test different messengers delivering information
to see who is going to be the most effective and that is something to think about in reviewing
and crafting new messages as well.
A quick recap of what we covered.
We started talking about framing as a set of choices that we make about how we explain
something, so what language we are using and everyone needs to do it.
We are all doing it all the time.
We want to help people think a little differently and anticipate how our messages might be received
and that helps us plan how to explain things.
We have to remember that the public at large doesn’t necessarily think about an issue
the same way you do and you might have more information than someone else does, so the
point that it might difficult for this group to look at that smoking cessation message
because there is so much knowledge about prevention is well-taken, but we have to think about
how we can speak to wider audiences and we might need to explain more things in order
to help those audiences understand the issue a little bit better and of course well-framed
messages, so messages that think about how we explain something and that take communications
research and framing research into account can be a part of any communications strategy.
And, with that, I will get to questions but thank you for listening and get in touch.
[Gisela Rots]: Thank you so much, Mackenzie.
That that was meaty.
That was hearty.
That was really helpful.
I think we all have probably a lot of things kind of going around in our minds and so giving
folks a chance to sit on questions.
We now encourage you, if have more questions, to please put those in the chat box, but we
also want to acknowledge that we have a second webinar that we’ll be co-hosting with Frameworks.
It will be on October 5th from 3 to 4:30 Eastern time, so same timeframe as today.
And the title of that presentation is “Framing the Issue of Opioid Misuse Prevention”,
and kind of considering that and looking at all the folks on the line today we wanted
to provide people with an opportunity to share some of their hopes for what would be included
in that webinar.
We’ve got most of the content developed and ready to go but there are some opportunities
for us to do some tweaking, so in the right-hand chat box, you see ideas for follow-up webinar.
That’s that October 5th webinar.
If you have questions that you really want to make sure we spend time on there, please
put those there.
Like I said, we can’t change the whole presentation, but we have a little bit of space for that.
And the invitation for that will actually be going out next week so watch your inboxes
for that.
We do have a couple of more minutes and there were a couple of comments in the chat box
around, again, thinking about who we work with, Mackenzie, is so important and it depends
on who our population is and what our resources are and how we should be framing the message.
Simultaneously, I think one of the things that we saw in the chat box was just the wide
variety of people we have on the line today, right?
So, Puerto Rico, California, Connecticut, Maine, Kentucky, Montana just to name a few.
And I wonder whether you could, not in dissertation length, but in just a couple of minutes say
anything about kind of regional differences that you have observed in terms of the kinds
of messages and the kinds of frames that might work.
Not to put you on the spot or anything.
[Mackenzie Price]: Oh, sure.
No, no.
That’s a good question and I would love to talk about it because it’s important.
So, one thing that’s good and interesting about our work is we work hard to take into
account that we are a large place and so when we are doing the first part of our research
process, in trying to think about how the public thinks and talks about an issue, we
go a lot of places and try and talk to as many people as possible, but of course there
is no way to talk to everyone, but when we are thinking about cultural models, one thing
that is important about them is that we are looking for the patterns that are recurring
and that don’t change a lot over time.
As an organization, you know, Frameworks has been in this business for about 21 years and
so one of their -- excuse me, 19 years, so one of the things we are always looking for
are those ways of talking about an issue that don’t really change over time.
And in the parts of our research that also look into print materials and media as well,
we try and collect as much of that as possible to try and be representative.
One thing that is interesting about cultural models specifically is that when we try and
kind of compare them across regions, they aren’t all that different.
So, for example, this idea of the family bubble, the idea that parents are the only people
who are responsible for young people’s outcomes, that idea, that way of thinking about families
shows up not only across issue areas, it shows up everywhere across issue areas, but it is
really, really durable no matter where, if you are thinking about geographic location,
it shows up everywhere that we go.
So that is, in a way, heartening for us to know that you can in doing this type of research
into public thinking you can find patterns that are shared and so those are the ones
that we are trying to develop frames that respond to because those are the things that
are going to be most generalizable, durable across the landscape.
[Gisela Rots]: That’s really, really helpful.
Thanks for that and I think that that helps resonate with the rest of us that these are
things that we all need to be thinking about are relevant.
And just taking a look at the time, we are in need of wrapping up so we have made a note
of the questions that folks have placed in the chat boxes and we will see what we can
do about integrating some of those into the next webinar or if there’s another way to
follow up, we will do that.
In the meantime, we just want to thank everyone so much for joining us today.
There is a brief evaluation we’d love for you to fill out and you may have gotten popped
over to that screen.
We would love for you to take a few moments and give us some feedback.
And we will wrap up today and we will hope to see most of you on October 5th.
Again, if you can’t make it, you can register and get the recording after the fact.
We will be posting the materials and the recording for today’s webinar on that CAPT Connect
event page along with a couple of other resources that folks have asked for.
Thank you all so much for joining us and, Mackenzie, thank you so much for spending
the afternoon with us and we look forward to working and seeing you again on a future
webinar.
[Mackenzie Price]: Thank you.
It was my pleasure.