At Animal Advocacy Careers, we ran two concurrent studies of our one-to-one careers advice calls and our online course. We had a measure in there for cause prioritisation (a subcomponent of our overall “attitudes” metric), amongst many other outcome measures. Both interventions devoted at least some effort to encouraging (some) people to shift cause prioritisation.
We found evidence that the interventions each had significant effects on some outcomes (e.g. career plans, “career-related behaviours,”), but neither had significant effects on attitudes. In fact, there was some somewhat concerning evidence of a backfire effect on the cause prioritisation question, although this seems to be reduced to nothing in some of the sensitivity analyses.
So in short, we found that our intervention failed to persuade people to change cause areas despite being effective at some of the other things we tried. Ofc, this could be a reflection of our interventions. But it’s at least weak evidence that persuading people to alter their cause prioritisation is difficult in general.
I’ve finished the write-up of this but am waiting on some additional feedback and we haven’t published it yet. Feel free to email me (jamie@animaladvocacycareers.org) if reviewing the current draft would be helpful.
At Animal Advocacy Careers, we ran two concurrent studies of our one-to-one careers advice calls and our online course. We had a measure in there for cause prioritisation (a subcomponent of our overall “attitudes” metric), amongst many other outcome measures. Both interventions devoted at least some effort to encouraging (some) people to shift cause prioritisation.
We found evidence that the interventions each had significant effects on some outcomes (e.g. career plans, “career-related behaviours,”), but neither had significant effects on attitudes. In fact, there was some somewhat concerning evidence of a backfire effect on the cause prioritisation question, although this seems to be reduced to nothing in some of the sensitivity analyses.
So in short, we found that our intervention failed to persuade people to change cause areas despite being effective at some of the other things we tried. Ofc, this could be a reflection of our interventions. But it’s at least weak evidence that persuading people to alter their cause prioritisation is difficult in general.
I’ve finished the write-up of this but am waiting on some additional feedback and we haven’t published it yet. Feel free to email me (jamie@animaladvocacycareers.org) if reviewing the current draft would be helpful.