SunSmart, a national skin cancer prevention campaign from the UK non-profit organization Cancer Research UK, provides evidence-based information about skin cancer and sun protection.
In a recent research study for SunSmart, qualitative research was used to yield findings about young people and sun protection for their summer national campaign.
According to Adverting and Public Relation’s Research, qualitative research “observes what people say and do”. It is a means of describing meaning, comprehension and processes. The main aim is to gather a deep understanding of human behavior and the reasons behind such behavior from smaller samples. For example, focus groups and individual interviews.
More specifically to the UK SunSmart campaign, the qualitative investigation was to investigate the “attitudes towards the sun, sun protection and skin cancer among young people and mothers of young children”. The results were concluded by 12 moderated focus groups with up to 8 respondents in each group. The targeted audience of the samples included mothers aged 25-34 with one or to children aged 2-6 years, teenagers living at home from 12-13 and 16-17 separately, as well as, young adults living at home and independently 21-24 years old each.
This sample group yielded the following qualitative conclusions:
• The potential long-term risk of skin cancer is of limited interest to young people.
• Tanning is extremely desirable and thus safer tanning advice is the only message likely to be accepted by dedicated tanners.
• Skin ageing and skin damage caused by the sun is of concern to young women and has the potential to motivate behavior change.
• Young people are more likely to consider sun protection when travelling abroad, but less likely to think of it in the UK.
• The use of factor 15+ sunscreen is really the only sun protection message which young people are willing to consider/adopt.
• Mothers typically take responsibility for sun protection for the whole family. In regard to their children, mothers are generally receptive to sun protection advice.
Additionally, comments such as “I think showing you how a mole can change, that’s a wakeup call. You start to think, ‘I wonder if any of my moles are changing’" by a female in the 25-35 group as well as the comment in the transcript, “I think they need to let people know you can still tan wearing sun creams. Yeah it protects you while you tan” by another female in the 25-35 group, show just how informative qualitative focus groups are at getting into the mindset of the consumer’s awareness or perception of a product or in this case an idea.
In sum, these findings from the qualitative sample evaluation led the SunSmart team to decide what messages they wanted to inform people in their proposed skin cancer prevention campaign. These topics fittingly included skin cancer and mole awareness.
The final product from these results can be seen within the picture at the beginning of this article. Overall, I was surprised to see that research participants did not care about the effects of skin cancer. Most of this was not due to lack of education of skin cancer effects but due to personal life choice to want to look good being tan. Therefore, I feel it is important that awareness of protection of skin is not enough. One must also showing how one looks because of tanning inside the ad campaign since this concept was found inside the qualitative research study. Thus, qualitative research in the PR campaign production process helps to create less ambiguity that your target audience will pick up your message seeing as the data collected supports the sample's beliefs.
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