Background: According to the data from International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, China has become the world's third largest consumer of medical surgery in 2018 and young Chinese women under the age of 35 accounts for a large consumer share of 88 percent, with the percentage of females under 25 increasing year by year in obtaining medical beauty information by short video. It illustrates that quantities of young Chinese women suffer from the lure of cosmetic surgery information on psychology increasingly, impling the significance of social gender care and health communication, while there is few empirical studies on this in China based on psychological scale.
Purpose: This research aims to study on to what extent can short video advertisements of medical surgery affect the consumption attitude of young Chinese females, especially female college students who cogonized it little before, with advertising appeals and spokespersons being two independent variables in advertisement materials.
Hypothesis: The Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB) put forward by Ajzen(1991) showed effectiveness to study on consumption attitude (Dong, 2013), which is measured by Behavior Attitude, Subjective Norm, Perceived Behavior Control and, Behavior Intention. Based on TPB and Medical Surgery Acceptance(ACSS) from Viren Swami(2011), hypotheses are as follows: only once access to short video advertisements of plastic surgery would significantly affect Chinese female college students who hardly cognized it before, and the changes to varying degrees can be revealed by Behavioral Attitude(AT), Subjective Norm(SN), Perceptual Behavior Control(PBC) and Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery(ACSS). Moreover, advertising appeals and spokespersons as two independent variables, can both affect young females and exert interaction effect.
Method: A 2X2 pretest-posttest experiment was applied among 150 Chinese female college students(n=150). Pre-test was set to select participants unknowledgeable with cosmetic surgery and to compare with the change of psychological index in post-test after watching advertisement. In the experiment conducted in school library, four experimental groups were set up to watch different combination of advertisement and a control group watched an advertisement without appeals and spokespersons, with 30 young female participants assigned randomly to each group.
Findings: Firstly, short video advertisements of medical surgery significantly affects female college students’ consumption attitude who didn' t cognize it before, especially on Perceptual Behavior Control(PBC), despite the advertisement just being as short as one minute. Secondly, spokesmen influence obviously on young females(p=0.032<0.05) while appeals show little effect, Furthermore, the interaction of appeals and spokesmen is unapparent, which means the access to medical surgery information exerts influence significantly regardless of advertising components.
Discussion: With the new scale based on TPB theory and scale of ACSS in experiment(α=0.921), it is validated that only once access to short video advertisement cosmetic surgery could significantly impact young females' consumption intention although they didn' t cognize it, more specifically, arousing their motivation for cosmetic surgery with the factors of Social Norm(SN) and Perceptual Behavior Control(PBC) of risk being weakened obviously by authoritative advertisement spokesmen and, leading to further discussion on cosmetic surgery information on short video platforms and qualitative researches on detailed causes of females' psychological change.