Does the media contribute to raising awareness of organ donation? Evidence from Brazil
Abstract
Purpose
Brazil has the second-biggest transplant system in the world. The organ donation rates, however, are still low. To persuade the population towards the theme, media interventions are broadcast regularly. This article analyses how media intervention in the form of advertising campaigns, telenovelas, and news can raise the rates of organ donations in Brazil.
Design/methodology/approach
We obtained data from the Brazilian Association for Organ Transplantation (ABTO), the Brazilian Health Ministry (HM), the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Globoplay, and other media sources to build a panel with quarterly data from 2009 to 2019, by state. Then we used fixed-effect panel regression models with healthcare supply and demographics as control variables to ascertain the effect of the media variable on organ donations during this period.
Findings
The results indicate that media interventions can increase the number of effective organ donors by up to 1%. The coefficient of media interventions is significant and positive for telenovelas (95% C.I 0.156–0.164), and for news in the following quarter (95% C.I 0.108–0.232), not significant individually for contemporaneous news or government advertising campaigns.
Social implications
Telenovelas and news presentations are effective tools of awareness for organ donation. Empirically, media interventions in the form of telenovelas or news impact organ donation as much as improvements in the healthcare system and can diminish the mortality on the waiting list by 17%.
Originality/value
This is the first time that media coverage and organ donation campaigns are evaluated together using panel data analysis in Brazil.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2023-0221
Keywords
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous referees for the useful suggestions for this study.
Funding: There was no funding source for this study. The authors had free access to the study data and the responsibility for the submission of this paper for publication.
Competing interests: We declare no competing interests.
Availability of data and material: All data used are publicly available in the mentioned sources.
Code availability: The software code is available under request.
Citation
Feldens, T.K. and Jacinto, P.d.A. (2024), "Does the media contribute to raising awareness of organ donation? Evidence from Brazil", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-03-2023-0221
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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