Television is More Effective in Bringing Behavioral Change: Evidence from Heat-Wave Awareness Campaign in India

• This study is first of its kind that uses secondary data to evaluate media effect in public health communication.
• It evaluates individual media.
• It conducts a daily panel analysis.
• It is based on a developing country.
• It finds television as the most effective media.

SummaryThis paper analyzes a unique data set that details the daily advertisements on Information, Education and Communication (IEC) material to avert heat stroke mortality in different media used by the state government of Odisha, India and the actual daily heat-wave mortalities in the state over a period of eight years. The paper then investigates the relative effectiveness of the different media in reducing mortality econometrically. The government adopted awareness generation as an adaptation strategy for heat waves in the year 2003 and intensified the use of public media from 2007 when multiple newspapers and radio and television channels were used for dissemination. I analyze the district-level daily death occurrences due to heat stroke using both linear and non-linear econometric models. Media used on the same day or on previous days are represented in the models by grouping them as either print, audio or video media. The data used is a daily panel data set consisting of only summer days (15th March–20th June) for the years 2005–12 for each of the 30 districts of the state. The estimated models account for the gap in data and the multidimensional nature of the panel (days, months, years). The results show the repeated use of video media to be the most effective in reducing deaths followed by newspapers and radio. The paper’s novel contribution is the use of secondary data to evaluate media and compare media effect of public health communication strategies in a developing country.