For example, participants have been asked to respond to questionnaire items asking for ratings of messages on persuasiveness, convincingness, effectiveness, and the like (e.g., Mackert et al., Citation2014 Popova, Neilands, & Ling, Citation2014), to rank-order messages in terms of persuasiveness (e.g., Mouneyrac, Le Floch, Lemercier, Py, & Roumegue, Citation2017 Pollard et al., Citation2016), or to engage in focus-group discussions concerning relative message persuasiveness (e.g., Mowbray, Marcu, Godinho, Michie, & Yardley, Citation2016 Record, Harrington, Helme, & Savage, Citation2018). Footnote 2 The data usually come from members of the target audience, though sometimes from experts in the subject matter of advocacy. Measures of perceived or expected persuasiveness (PME, perceived message effectiveness, or PE, perceived effectiveness) have commonly been used to address this question. In the simplest case, two messages will be under consideration for use, and the question is: Which message will be more effective? Footnote 1 Message Pretesting and Perceived Persuasiveness Measuresįormative research can have many purposes, but one common purpose is that of pretesting potential messages so as to identify the most effective ones. A concluding section identifies appropriate criteria for assessing potential message-pretesting procedures and suggests a possible new role for perceived-persuasiveness measures in formative research. The argument will be that the commonly reported correlations between measures of perceived persuasiveness and measures of actual persuasiveness – correlations between individuals’ scores on perceived and actual persuasiveness – are not relevant to the question of whether perceived-persuasiveness measures are diagnostic of differences in messages’ actual effectiveness. In what follows, the use of perceived-persuasiveness measures in message pretesting is given some further specification, and the correlational evidence is then examined more closely. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine that correlational evidence, with an eye to suggesting that it is less compelling than might be supposed. The message-pretesting use of these measures has often been underwritten by pointing to evidence showing that such measures are positively correlated with measures of persuasive outcomes such as attitude, intention, and behavior. Measures of perceived message persuasiveness are widely used in this enterprise. By pretesting alternative possible messages, a message designer can choose ones likely to be relatively more effective. Persuasive message pretesting is a valuable element of formative research.
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