IMPACT OF THE MASS-MEDIA ON CALLS TO THE CDC NATIONAL AIDS HOTLINE

This paper considers new computer methodologies for assessing the impa ct of different types of public health information. The example used p ublic service announcements (PSAs) and mass media news to predict the volume of attempts to call the CDC National AIDS Hotline from December 1992 through to the end of 1993. The analysis relied solely on data f rom electronic databases. Newspaper stories and television news transc ripts were obtained from the NEXIS electronic database and were scored by machine for AIDS coverage. The PSA database was generated by compu ter monitoring of advertising distributed by the Centers for Disease C ontrol and Prevention (CDC) and by others. The volume of call attempts was collected automatically by the public branch exchange (PBX) of th e Hotline telephone system. The call attempts, the PSAs and the news s tory data were related to each other using both a standard time series method and the statistical model of ideodynamics. The analysis indica ted that the only significant explanatory variable for the call attemp ts was PSAs produced by the CDC. One possible explanation was that the se commercials all included the Hotline telephone number while the oth er information sources did not.