CPSC has incorporated some elements of key consumer education practices to provide consumer product safety information to minority populations, such as periodically using consumer and other stakeholder input to inform its outreach efforts, but it has not specifically defined goals or developed measures to assess whether these efforts are effectively reaching minority populations.
CPSC's consumer information efforts are intended to provide notice of product recalls and guidance on safely using products to the general public, although some of its safety information regarding children's products has also been targeted to minority populations, particularly the Hispanic community. CPSC provides information in Spanish for many of its outreach efforts, and according to CPSC officials, has hired a Hispanic media consumer outreach specialist to assist with translations and to work with the Hispanic media, and has established practices to develop and disseminate safety information to this community. CPSC officials also told us that they provide information to Spanish-language television and radio stations, use Spanish-speaking telephone operators for CPSC's toll-free hotline, and maintain a language bank to provide assistance for calls in other languages. During fiscal year 2008, CPSC records indicate that CPSC hotline staff answered 1,570 calls in Spanish. The main CPSC Web site also includes a section called El Mundo Hispano de la CPSC with recall notices and other product safety information in Spanish. See figure 4 for examples of CPSC consumer information in Spanish and English.
CPSC has also identified and established relationships with other organizations to help disseminate consumer safety information to additional minority communities through electronic, broadcast, and print media. For example, CPSC officials noted that in 2000, CPSC worked with the Bureau of Primary Health Care, Gerber, and Black Entertainment Television (BET) to launch a safe sleep campaign to help lower sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) rates, especially among African-Americans. The campaign included a nationwide television public service announcement about placing babies to sleep on their backs to prevent SIDS, and special programming to be televised on BET. CPSC has also worked on media outreach campaigns with other organizations such as public health agencies, industry groups, and child safety organizations. In 2004, CPSC launched the Neighborhood Safety Network (NSN), to enlist support from community-based organizations in extending its messages to communities it designated as hard to reach, including older Americans, urban and rural low-income families, new parents, and minority groups. According to CPSC officials, CPSC uses NSN, now numbering about 5,600 member organizations, to deliver information to minority populations. Membership in NSN is free and enrollment is voluntary. Some of the member organizations include HHS, hospitals and health clinics, day care centers, fire stations, parent organizations, and American Indian reservations. CPSC has developed a Web page offering online safety materials that NSN members can modify for use with specific groups. NSN member organizations receive CPSC's e-mail updates with product safety information on topics such as drowning prevention, crib and toy safety, and poison prevention and may elect to employ these in their own outreach efforts.
Organizations we contacted for this report, including NSN members, consumer groups, and organizations that conduct injury prevention research or implement injury prevention programs in diverse communities generally reported using safety information provided by CPSC, and some offered suggestions for improving efforts to reach minority communities. Some of the organizations said that they receive information from CPSC via e-mail notifications, and some mentioned distributing flyers or posters provided by CPSC and incorporating information from CPSC into their own pamphlets and brochures. Some suggestions to improve consumer information efforts for minority populations included additional exposure through broadcast media because access to electronic information via computers may be limited. Some NSN members also said it would be useful if safety information were provided in additional languages. According to CPSC officials, the agency does not have the resources to translate information into additional languages, but one NSN member we interviewed mentioned that their organization had translated some CPSC materials for its audiences. Some organizations also expressed interest in collaborating more closely with CPSC on its consumer information efforts.
CPSC has periodically conducted audience research to strengthen its consumer information efforts. In 2003, the agency funded a literature review to examine the factors influencing consumers' understanding of and responses to recall notices and other safety information. The study findings suggested ways product recall communications could be improved to help consumers eliminate or reduce product hazards, such as using pictures and signal language like "warning" or "danger" to help consumers attend to and understand safety messages. CPSC also created an online Consumer Opinion Forum that consumers can join to provide feedback on product safety issues, such as how a recall notice could be written more clearly; however, consumers must have Internet access to participate in this forum. In addition, CPSC recognizes that to understand the culture and diversity within the Hispanic community, it must take certain steps such as interviewing members of the community, reviewing related research, and consulting with colleagues from other federal agencies. For example, to translate and adapt materials for one of its outreach campaigns for different segments of the Spanish-speaking audience, CPSC conducted interviews with members of the Hispanic community from varying educational backgrounds. Although CPSC has periodically conducted audience research, agency officials told us they do not have the resources to regularly pretest safety messages. However, officials from a few organizations we interviewed noted that CPSC could conduct focus groups with members of the target audience or include representatives of organizations that work with the target audience on an advisory committee to help design and implement safety campaigns.
CPSC has also established goals for its overall consumer information efforts, but not for its messages targeted to specific populations. In its 2008 performance and accountability report, CPSC stated that its goal for using consumer information was to alert the public to children's and other hazards through consumer outreach, press releases, and conducting nine public information efforts that included topics such as drowning and poisoning prevention. CPSC sets annual performance goals that measure the success for each of these consumer information methods according to the total number of items issued, viewed, or conducted during that fiscal year. For example, CPSC set a fiscal year 2008 goal to receive 450 million views of its safety messages through television appearances, video news releases, and downloads of e-publications.
CPSC relies on the Neighborhood Safety Network to share product safety information with audiences that can be hard to reach, but the agency has not formally assessed whether these populations are receiving and using the information. And while CPSC tracks the number of views its safety messages receive, CPSC officials stated that they do not collect information on audience demographics, which could indicate the target audiences being reached. Likewise, CPSC has conducted surveys to assess customer satisfaction with its toll-free hotline, Web site, and partnerships with state government agencies, and these surveys indicate a high level of satisfaction with CPSC services; however, these surveys do not collect information about the demographic characteristics of the consumers using CPSC's services to determine the extent to which they are representative of the general population. According to CPSC officials, CPSC has also not identified outcome measures to evaluate how well its campaigns affected the attitudes and behaviors of the target audiences it set out to influence. We previously identified strategies used by other federal agencies to evaluate the effectiveness of information campaigns, including analyzing findings from previous research, collaborating with program partners to help meet the information needs of diverse audiences and expand the usefulness of evaluations, and surveying the intended audience to ask about program exposure, knowledge, and attitude change. CPSC officials have also cited a lack of resources as a challenge to establishing evaluation programs to measure results; however, CPSC has recently received more resources from the fiscal year 2009 appropriation for the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act. In the course of our review, CPSC officials stated that with this new funding for the act, they planned to include an evaluation component, but as of the writing of this report, it was not yet known how CPSC planned to implement this component.
Protecting children from dangerous consumer products is a critical part of CPSC's mission. Some research suggests that there are racial and ethnic disparities in child death rates due to injuries related to particular consumer products; however, CPSC does not routinely assess whether such disparities exist, primarily because data limitations make it challenging to conduct such analyses. In addition, the lack of information about other characteristics of individuals who are injured or die from involvement with a consumer product, such as socioeconomic status, prevents CPSC from identifying potential underlying causes of racial and ethnic differences in injury and death rates. Without efforts to augment or improve existing data, CPSC may not know which groups are most vulnerable to product-related injury or death. If available data are improved, CPSC may be better able to identify hazards that disproportionately affect certain communities and develop ways to reduce those hazards.
Despite limited information on racial and ethnic differences in product-related injury and death, CPSC has made some special efforts to deliver some of its consumer information to audiences the agency identified as hard to reach, including minority groups. However, CPSC has not collected information on whether these targeted groups are receiving and acting on the safety information. Without fully assessing its consumer education and public outreach campaigns, CPSC cannot know how effective these initiatives are at reaching intended audiences, some of which may be at an elevated risk of injury or death.
To better understand the relative risk of product-related injury among minority and nonminority children, we recommend that the Commission, in consultation with HHS,
- Develop and implement cost-effective means of improving CPSC's data collection on factors that may contribute to differences in the incidence of injury and death related to specific types of consumer products, including race, ethnicity, and other patient characteristics. For example, steps CPSC could consider include improving the NEISS racial and ethnic classification system; working with NEISS hospitals to improve collection of data on patient race and ethnicity; and leveraging related data collection efforts, such as those sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, or the National Institutes of Health.
To improve the effectiveness of consumer information efforts, we recommend that the Commission,
- Develop and implement cost-effective ways to enhance and assess the likelihood that CPSC's safety messages are received and implemented by all the intended audiences. For example, CPSC could consider convening groups of consumers or Neighborhood Safety Network members to advise on the design and implementation of campaigns targeted to specific communities, surveying NSN members, establishing metrics to measure NSN's success, and evaluating the effectiveness of information campaigns targeted to the racial and ethnic groups at highest risk of drowning as part of its implementation of the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act.
Portions of this article appeared in the August 10, 2009 edition of our premium sister service, Product Safety Letter. It is just one of the hundreds of similar stories that subscribers read over the course of an annual subscription. Subscription information is here
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