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Burning YOUR/ OUR bridges & helping Syrian refugees : The way, message valence and pronoun use influence pro-refugee Germans and anti-refugee Slovaks in changing their attitudes and behavioural intentions towards Syrian refugees

Kapková, Z. (2016) Burning YOUR/ OUR bridges & helping Syrian refugees : The way, message valence and pronoun use influence pro-refugee Germans and anti-refugee Slovaks in changing their attitudes and behavioural intentions towards Syrian refugees.

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Abstract:	Background: The conflict in Syria starting in March, 2011 between the government of Bashar al-Assad and other forces resulted in one of the biggest influxes of refugees in the history. More than three million Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, six and half million were displaced within Syria and more than 150,000 Syrians have declared asylum in the states of the European Union. Recently, thousands of Syrian refugees are fleeing to Europe seeking peaceful living conditions. (UNHCR, 2016; Amnesty International, 2016) Aim: Firstly, there was the necessity to design a campaign that would positively change the attitudes of pro-refugee German citizens whose welcoming attitude towards Syrian refugees was decreasing and of anti-refugee Slovak citizens. Secondly, the objective was to influence their intention to help Syrian refugees and to spread the campaign’s message. Moreover, “WirZusammen” and “Caritas” in Deutschland and “Organisation for Aid to Refugees” in Slovakia are a couple of few organisations focusing on Syrian refugees that could benefit from this study and use the research for their volunteering purposes. Method: The type of the conducted research was experimental with between-subject factors. The presented study consists of a 2 (positive vs. negative message valence) x 2 (the use of pronouns “you” vs. “we”) x 2 (pro-refugee Germans vs. anti-refugee Slovaks) experimental design conducted within eastern and western European countries. To investigate the effects of independent variables, each German and Slovak respondent was randomly assigned to one of four different campaign messages. The data collection was carried out by the snowball sampling technique and the survey was created in the online survey tool called Qualtrics. Results: In total, there were 326 valid responses, particularly 176 from German and 150 from Slovak respondents. The results have been evaluated by conducting MANOVA, regression, mediation and correlation analysis. The relation between the independent variables and a significant effect of a mediator, namely moral obligation, was detected. Conclusion: Resulting from these analyses, it can be concluded that the positive message valence had surprisingly significantly higher effect on the attitude towards the campaign and the pronoun “we” had a stronger effect on the attitude towards the campaign and the intention to help Syrian refugees of both Germans and Slovaks. The interaction effect of two independent variables could not be confirmed by MANOVA due to the non-significance of the outcomes. The three-way interaction was not confirmed in this study. However, the present study provides the marketers with theoretical guideline how to create a persuading campaign. Key words: campaign, Syrian refugees, pronouns use, message valence, Germans and Slovaks
Item Type:	Essay (Master)
Faculty:	BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:	05 communication studies
Programme:	Communication Studies MSc (60713)
Link to this item:	https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/70771
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