Reliability of a rating procedure to monitor industry self-regulation codes governing alcohol advertising content

Objective: The purposes of this study were to develop reliable procedures to monitor the content of alcohol advertisements broadcast on television and in other media, and to detect violations of the content guidelines of the alcohol industry's self-regulation codes. Method: A set of rating-scale items was developed to measure the content guidelines of the 1997 version of the US. Beer Institute Code. Six focus groups were conducted with 60 college students to evaluate the face validity of the items and the feasibility of the procedure. A test-retest reliability study was then conducted with 74 participants, who rated five alcohol advertisements on two occasions separated by I week. Results: Average correlations across all advertisements using three reliability statistics (r, rho, and kappa) were almost all statistically significant and the kappas were good for most items, which indicated high test-retest agreement. We also found high interrater reliabilities (intraclass correlations) among raters for item-level and guideline-level violations, indicating that regardless of the specific item, raters were consistent in their general evaluations of the advertisements. Conclusions: Naive (untrained) raters can provide consistent (reliable) ratings of the main content guidelines proposed in the U.S. Beer Institute Code. The rating procedure may have future applications for monitoring compliance with industry self-regulation codes and for conducting research on the ways in which alcohol advertisements are perceived by young adults and other vulnerable populations.