Health Campaigns: Unintended Effects

This entry describes Cho and Salmon's conceptualization, typology, and dimensions of unintended effects of health communication campaigns. According to Cho and Salmon, the unintended effects take on five dimensions comprising time, audiences, specificity, valence, and levels, and encompass at least 11 different types including obfuscation, dissonance, boomerang, culpability, social reproduction, and system activation. Understanding these unintended effects is integral to improving the future design of campaigns. Building on Cho and Salmon, this entry discusses potential causes of unintended effects including errors in designing and implementing the campaigns and the complexity of contexts. It then suggests ways to prevent unintended effects, including campaign theory development, system thinking in all stages of campaigns, and building transdisciplinary knowledge bases.