The goals of this paper were to explore the influence of family communication on individual trust in food/drink advertisements. One hundred and sixty-three native speakers of English (age 18-28) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and forty were recruited from Michigan State University SONA credit pool to participate in the main study. This paper displayed frequency distributions of messages participants recalled their parents talked about healthy eating. Employing the ADTRUST (Soh et al., 2009), Family Communication Pattern (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990), and SKEP scales (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998), this paper used nested OLS regression models to examine how trust in advertisements was related to the message rationale, the promoting approach, family communication patterns and skepticism toward general advertisements. Findings indicated that people were more likely to recall messages with a rationale than without a rationale, and were more likely to recall messages using the promoting approach than the attacking approach. The message rationale had no effect on trust in either unhealthy or healthy food/drink ads. The promoting approach increased trust in unhealthy food/drink ads but had no effect on trust in healthy food/drink ads. I did not find the effects of either conversation-oriented or conformity-oriented family communication on trust in unhealthy food/drink ads, while the effects of conformity-oriented family communication were observed on trust in healthy food/drink ads. There was a negative association between skepticism toward general ads and trust in both healthy and unhealthy food/drink ads.
Read
