As changes in climate, land-use, and vegetation alter the landscape of the Great Plains, new threats are emerging. Incidences of tick-borne disease contraction in Nebraska have increased nearly 250% over the past two decades – newly established species like Ixodes scapularis may introduce challenges for health practitioners, including more cases of Lyme Disease. Strategies for tick-borne disease prevention especially need to include effective health messaging. Audience segmentation may be a useful technique to provide health communication, targeting messaging that speaks to attitudes and beliefs of a given population. One tool for usefully segmenting populations is the Risk Perception Attitude Framework (RPAF) – this groups individuals into four categories based on their perceived risk towards a threat and their efficacy in protecting themselves from the threat. We applied the RPAF to a sample of hunters in Nebraska to assess how well intent to perform preventative behaviors could be predicted from the RPAF group an individual was grouped with.
Results/Conclusions
Our ANOVA model found significantly higher behavior intent and issue salience among individuals in the RPAF group with highest perceived risk and self-efficacy. This information can be used to identify clusters of individuals with similar beliefs towards tick-borne disease and provide more effective health messaging.
