Peripheral cues and involvement level: influences on acceptance of a mammography message

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) suggests that some communication elements are processed differently depending on a receiver's involvement with the message topic. We hypothesized that women with high levels of breast cancer involvement would be more influenced by a mammography message's arguments than by the message's peripheral cues and, conversely, that women with low levels of involvement would be more influenced by a mammography message's peripheral cues than by the message's arguments. We exposed 89 low-income African American women aged 40 to 65 years to two repetitions of a mammography promotion public service announcement embedded as a commercial within a television talk show. We used a 2 (involvement level) x 2 (argument strength) x 2 (peripheral cue favorability) factorial posttest-only design. The analysis detected a significant main effect for involvement and an interaction between peripheral cue favorability and involvement. High-involvement women reported stronger intentions than did low-involvement women to seek additional mammography information, regardless of argument strength or cue favorability. Low-involvement women reported stronger intentions to seek more mammography information only when exposed to the favorable cue condition. The analysis detected no effect for argument strength in high- or low-involvement women. The ELM appears useful for designing mammography messages. As many women may have low involvement with breast cancer, mammography promotion messages that include favorable peripheral cues may be more likely to impact mammography information seeking than argument-based-only messages.