Participatory Communication Management in Reducing Alcohol Consumption of the Well-Being Community of North-Eastern region of Thailand

Abstract

        The objectives of this research were to compare the “well-being communities” in Northeastern Thailand that had won an award for reducing alcohol consumption with communities that had not won an award in terms of: 1) communication management; 2) community management to drive participatory communication; and 3) forms of managing participatory communication.

        This was a mixed methods research. For the qualitative part 16 key informants in each of 2 sub-districts (total of 32 samples) were interviewed, comprising community leaders, public health officials, local administrative organization officials, and leaders of civil society. The key informants were chosen by purposive sampling from Samut Sub-district (a well-being community that won an award for reducing alcohol consumption) and Thung Mon Sub-district (a community that did not win an award), both located in Prasat District, Surin Province. The data collection tool was an in-depth interview form. Data were analyzed through descriptive analysis. For the quantitative analysis, 8 well-being communities in the Northeast that had won awards for reducing alcohol consumption and 8 communities that had not won awards were chosen by simple random sampling, then 15 community leaders were randomly chosen from each community, for a total sample size of 240. Data were statistically analyzed by frequency distribution, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t test to compare the 2 types of communities, and one-way analysis of variance.

        The results showed that 1) communications management by the communities that won awards for reducing alcohol consumption consisted of building knowledge of the community health charter, setting communication goals for alcohol sellers and drinkers about communication activities with the objective of reducing alcohol consumption in the community, followed by setting approaches for consistent, ongoing communications and communication planning to follow and implement the community charter. Lastly, the communications were evaluated to see if people in the community were conscious of the message to reduce alcohol consumption. These aspects of communication management were different from in the communities that did not win awards to a statistically significant degree at 0.05 confidence level. 2) Community management to drive participatory communication consisted of building teams of core communication leaders who were non-drinkers, managing campaign funds transparently with no conflicts, managing commu- nications equipment, participatory communications management by building groups of leaders, jointly assessing problems, analyzing information and giving feedback to the community to develop the community charter. This was followed up by evaluating operations and alcohol consumption reduction results to give community members incentive and a feeling of joint ownership in the communications, so they would want to be conscientious and cooperate by quitting drinking, selling alcohol only as allowed by law, and abstaining from serving alcoholic beverages at community functions. The communications managers and civil society leaders had to interact with and stay close to the members of the community all the time in order to make this a success. 3) As for forms of managing participatory communication to reduce alcohol consumption that differed to a statistically significant degree at 0.05 confidence level between communities that had won awards for reducing alcohol consumption and communities that had not won awards, the main difference was that communities that had not won awards tended to have sporadic communication that was not at regular intervals. The approaches of managing participatory communication to reduce alcohol consumption used in award-winning well-being communities in the Northeast described above can be expanded on and applied to other areas.