Funding outcome

Time and money are spent by organizations to create messages that try to change attitudes and behaviours about heart disease. It is important to evaluate these messages and find ways to improve them. Important questions not included in many evaluation studies are how people look for information and what they do with it once they find it. Another important issue that is not studied is the 'gut reaction' to messages. This reaction is important and may explain the effect a message might have, especially when many people don't take the time to think about a message. The purpose of this project is to understand how and why women look for information about heart disease and how existing messages may influence women. This information will be used in future resesarch to create better messages that reflect their needs. In the current research we will first find out how women look for information and how they feel about existing messages using focus groups. We will also examine the effects of these messages on women's attitudes and thoughts about heart disease by having women complete surveys and computer tasks. This research includes methods that will find out how women look for information.This is an important question that is not usually asked in this kind of research. Rather, it is assumed that the messages created by an organization will be found and that people will pay attention to them. This research also includes measures of women's 'gut reactions' that automatically arise when seeing a message. It is possible that it is the automatic reaction that actually influences what she does in response to the message.