Developing and evaluating a college diabetes prevention and awareness campaign

This article provides an overview and evaluation of a diabetes prevention and awareness campaign. The purpose of this project was to involve students and faculty across multiple disciplines in order to develop public service announcements (PSAs) targeting young adults aged 18-24. These PSAs were designed to promote diabetes prevention activities among African American college students. To this end, we assembled a 7-member team (3 faculty and 4 students) that included two Health Education faculty, one Communication Arts faculty, three Health Education majors, and one Communication Arts major to create the JCSU Diabetes Prevention and Awareness Campaign, 'Get the Picture'. The plan included development of two video PSAs (60-second and 30-second), a 30-second audio PSA, a campaign brochure, and campaign website. We then evaluated the impact of the brochure and 60-second PSA on students in terms of design and content, value affirmation, scope, and intended behavior changes. The authors describe the project in terms of cross-disciplinary collaboration, student involvement, production processes, and evaluative methodology.
INTRODUCTION Disparities between the overall health status of African Americans and other minorities and of the U.S. population as a whole have been well documented (Office of Minority Health Resource [...]