SLU Festival of Science 2001 Poster Presentation

The present study focuses on the effects of print media, specifically posters, on children’s risk-taking assessments.Risk-promoting and safety promoting posters are manipulated to determine the impact of contextual messages on children’s responses to a risk assessment questionnaire.The study included 96 children from a local school.Drawn from the fourth, sixth, and eighth grades, there were an equal number of boys and girls in each experimental condition.Testing occurred in a small room located within the school building.The testing groups were composed of four children of the same sex and grade level.A group of four posters, either safety-promoting or risk-promoting, adorned the walls.In the context of these posters, the children completed an Activity Questionnaire, which assessed 18 different risks including 6 socially approved and 12 socially disapproved risks.The children received instruction on a number of sample questions to ensure that all the rating scales were understood.Each testing session was approximately 20 minutes in length, following which the children were immediately returned to their classroom.Data collection will be completed today.It will be analyzed using 3x2x2 ANOVAs and multiple regression analyses.It was predicted that children’s risk-taking assessments on the risk questionnaire would be heightened when in the context of risk-promoting posters.Conversely, children would provide lower ratings when in the context of safety-promoting posters.In short, according to the Availability Heuristic, the posters will cue children’s memories of similar risk situations and will therefore affect their responses accordingly.