Chris Brown's Return to the Grammys: The Other Public Health Story

Sunday's Grammys were a mixture of high and low notes (pun intended), as the joy was often overshadowed by the death of Whitney Houston.  As someone who grew up in the 80's singing her songs, I too was quite shocked and saddened.  Despite broad speculation of an overdose, I'll wait to post on Whitney until we have a confirmed cause of death.

However, there was a second public health story on Sunday night.  It was the three year anniversary of Chris Brown assaulting Rihanna...and he made his return to the stage.  While Grammy executive producer Ken Ehrlich has defended the decision to bring Brown back and believes that he deserves a second chance, the warm sentiment was certainly not felt by all.  I personally turned the TV off when he began his performance.  My facebook and twitter feed blew up with comments from friends and colleagues like, "I'm no math wiz, but I'm pretty sure domestic abuser + 2 years= still a domestic abuser".  Many celebrities (both Grammy attendees and beyond) voiced the same sentiments on twitter.  For example, Wil Wheaton said simply, "everyone who apparently forgot what Chris Brown did to Rihanna should read the police report on exactly what he did."

Do you think that Chris Brown was worthy of a second chance at the Grammys? 

In addition to a discussion of giving second chances, remembering, or forgetting what he did...we must also discuss those who actually encourage what he did.  While there were outraged tweets during his performance, there were also those providing support.  The tweets that I found most disturbing were those from young women poking fun at the assault and saying that they would be happy to have it happen to them anytime.  For example, one woman said, "chris brown could beat me all he wants, he is flawless."

One of the biggest problems in our society is that we have a culture of violence where intimate partner violence is acceptable and abusers are not held responsible for their actions.     

What do you think we can do to stop the culture of violence?

In my opinion, Chris Brown is still the same angry and aggressive person that he was 3 years ago.  For example, instead of rising above and ignoring any negativity, he continues to lash out.  He took to his twitter after the ceremony to address his "haters".  He said, "HATE ALL YOU WANT BECUZ I GOT A GRAMMY Now! That's the ultimate F*** OFF!"  The tweet has since been deleted and he tried again with a slightly less offensive message.  But I don't buy it.  

For those of you interested in a more in-depth analysis of the original media coverage of the assault, I'll offer a publication.  This article was written by some fantastic colleagues at Boston University School of Public Health:

Rothman, EF, Nageswaran, A, Johnson RM, Adams, KM, Scrivens, J, Baughman, A. (in press).  U.S. tabloid magazine coverage of a celebrity dating abuse incident: Rihanna and Chris Brown.  Journal of Health Communication. Available online ahead of print.

If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at:  1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

Courteney and David: A Poorly Designed PSA That Makes Me Want to "Scream"

So Courteney Cox and David Arquette are having a tough week. First they announced their separation and now I have to highlight the poor design of a recent public service announcement (PSA) in which they starred. I must say- they made a much better team on the set of their "Scream" movies.

A recent Newsweek article entitled "Can PSAs End Domestic Violence?" discussed the Cox/Arquette PSA and outlined the challenges of using this particular health communication channel to address the public health problem of domestic violence. The article quotes a wonderful professor of mine (thank you Dr. Emily Rothman for posting this link), so I decided to check the PSA out for myself. Overall, my impression was not good. Let's compare the PSA to some best practices and/or guidelines and see how it holds up. A great resource on this (and all aspects of program planning) comes from the Community Toolbox:

1. PSA Length
A typical PSA runs about 30 seconds. This video runs 1 minute, 50 seconds. And the viewer does not even know what the video is about (cue a random segment about "furry" sex) until the timer hits 1 minute, 25 seconds. They could have very easily lost viewers by that point (either due to boredom, confusion, or because they were offended by the "furry" segment).

2. PSAs Should Have a Clear Message and Call To Action (i.e., what do you want the viewer to do after they see your video?)
So I was a little surprised that the video did not include any specific hotline numbers. In case the audience included victims of DV, you would think that it would be a priority to list those resources. Instead, the only "action" that I could see outlined was how to donate to "OPCC"...and it was unclear what that organization was. So I followed the instructions at the end of the video that gave their Facebook address. Again, there is a huge logo that says "OPCC" (still not sure what that is, so I probably won't give money) and finally (in much smaller writing) some hotline numbers on the left. I went one more step and went to the Ocean Park Community Center (OPCC) website, where it still wasn't immediately clear how this organization supported domestic violence prevention. Apparently, this PSA was to support one of the community programs called Sojourn (a women's shelter)...but geez- how hard was that to figure out!!!???

3. Like any good health communication product, there should be a clear target audience
I have no idea who the audience was for this PSA. This is a direct result of the lack of a clear "call to action". This video had no idea who they expected as an audience or what they wanted those individuals to do. Before the video starts, we are told "this is not for kids" (again- due to the "furry"). So kids are excluded as a possible audience- which is a shame because young adults are also victims of domestic violence. I'm assuming that domestic violence victims themselves are not the audience, since the video did not include any links to DV hotlines/shelters. I doubt the audience was supposed to be DV perpetrators, because I doubt that they would be giving donations. So maybe the intended audience was just potential donors? It is unclear.

4. Evaluation
Ahh! I know I'm a broken record about this issue on my blog. As Dr. Rothman states in the Newsweek article, "there haven't been that many well-designed, rigorous evaluations of the ad's effectiveness". The OPCC spokesperson says that it has been effective because "people are talking about the ad" (how do we know?) and Facebook traffic was up (as of tonight, just 365 people had "liked" the page). But even if "talk" is increased, is that really changing the attitudes or behaviors that were (maybe) targeted by this PSA? If they had clearer goals and a call to action (e.g., The audience for this PSA is women who are victims of DV and the behavior we want to see is an increase in calls to our hotline)- it would be much easier to evaluate. And that evaluation would go well beyond "awareness".