توسعه یک مقیاس برای اندازه گیری شک و تردید تبلیغات اجتماعی در میان نوجوانان

A significant amount of research has looked at the effectiveness of social marketing to teenagers, but teenagers' skeptical response to social advertising has not been considered. In this study, we review the relevant literature, develop a measure of social advertising skepticism with desirable psychometric properties, and show that social ad skepticism is distinct from the (commercial) ad skepticism that has been previously studied. We also develop a model of the antecedents and correlates of social advertising skepticism and test it using a sample of high-school students. Our results show that peer influence and reactance play a prominent role in an adolescent's skepticism of social and commercial ads. They also show that skeptical attitudes toward social ads are significantly correlated with reduced perceptions of the risks of some behaviors.

Although various attempts have been made to define ad skepticism, a common thread that runs among the various existing definitions of ad skepticism is that of trust. Indeed, ad skepticism often refers to the consumer's lack of trust in advertising (Boush et al., 1993, Boush et al., 1994 and Mangleburg and Bristol, 1998). Ford et al. (1990) reviewed consumer skepticism from the viewpoint of information economics and sought to show that ad claims higher in subjective, experiential and credence attributes would generate greater levels of ad skepticism than would objective claims. While most of their propositions were supported, they nevertheless called for further research to address whether skepticism should be considered unidimensional. This issue has been a controversial one. Although it is clear that a consumer can be skeptical of ad claims (Mangleburg and Bristol, 1998 and Boush et al., 1994), disagreement centers on whether or not ad skepticism should be conceptualized so as to also include the mistrust of an advertiser's motives or dislike of the intrusive nature of advertising (Obermiller and Spangenberg, 1998). Boush et al. (1994) found that their items designed to measure ad skepticism did not yield an unidimensional solution but rather a two-dimensional one, with the dimensions interpretable as mistrust of advertiser motives and disbelief in ad claims. They acknowledge concern about the factor solution representing a measurement artifact due to all the items loading on the ‘disbelief in ad claims’ factor being the negatively worded ones (reflecting lower skepticism) — nevertheless, they find the two-dimensional solution to be conceptually persuasive. Mangleburg and Bristol (1998) concur with Boush et al. (1994), seeing ad skepticism in terms of the perceived motivation of advertisers as well as the claims made by them, although they actually assess ad skepticism using a 4-item scale based on Gaski and Etzel's (1986) measure of sentiment to advertising.

A primary goal of our research was to extend research on ad skepticism into a social advertising context. Hence, we developed a measure of social advertising skepticism and demonstrated the reliability and validity of this measure using samples of teens, a group whose response to advertising has received scant attention (John, 1999, p. 191). We find that social ad skepticism relates to other variables substantially in line with expectations, providing evidence of nomological validity. Our results show that skepticism of social ads is a different construct than skepticism of commercial ads. Although the two constructs are modestly correlated, they are affected differently by predictor variables. We discuss our scale and other results below. Our final 8-item measure of social ad skepticism yields a Cronbach's alpha of .81 and is unidimensional. Assessing construct validity, we observed a modest correlation with Obermiller and Spangenberg's (1998) ad skepticism scale, providing evidence of discriminant validity. This suggests that those who are not skeptical of commercial advertising buy into a value constellation that also makes them more skeptical of social advertising messages. Additionally, the negative correlation between social ad skepticism and attitude toward social ads confirmed expectations that those who do not believe social ads regard them more negatively. Obermiller and Spangenberg (1998) also found a similar correlation between ad skepticism and attitude to advertising indicating that more skeptical subjects had more negative attitudes to advertising. Further, the modest negative correlation supports a claim of discriminant validity between attitude toward social ads and social ad skepticism. We also found a modest and significant positive correlation between social ad skepticism and cynicism, again consistent with past research, although the constructs are conceptually distinct (Boush et al., 1993).