Measuring Exposure to Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: A Validation Study in the Context of Cancer-Related Treatment Advertising

This research examines two recurrent conceptual issues of measuring media exposure in survey research—content specificity of survey items and whether exemplars should be provided to aid recall. In two population-based surveys, we evaluated three candidate measures of cancer patients’ self-reported exposure to cancer-related direct-to-consumer advertising (CR-DTCA); these measures varied in content specificity and provision of ad exemplars. All three measures performed equally well in terms of internal consistency, convergent, nomological, and discriminant validity. Increased content specificity or ad exemplars did not improve performance of the exposure measures. Participants were able to extrapolate from ad exemplars to report their exposure to broad categories of CR-DTCA. The briefest of the three measures posed the lowest level of survey costs and was deployed successfully for mailed and internet-based survey administration. We discussed future directions for application of these findings in DTCA research for other illness and for media exposure research more generally.