Developing Public Health Initiatives through Understanding Motivations of the Audience at Mass-Gathering Events[1]
Summary
Report synthesizing what is known about audience motivations at three mass-gathering types — outdoor music festivals, religious events, and sporting events — and how organizers and EMS can harness them. Argues motivations predict audience behaviors and their health consequences, enabling tailor-made health-promotion and safety messaging for the expected cohort; population-specific risks/hazards determine which public-health interventions to target. Positions health promotion and public information as core components of any event, and audience-behavior understanding as critical planning information for event planners, risk managers, and EMS to predict and reduce patient presentations.
So what
The psychosocial layer of the prediction problem: where PPR models use weather and attendance, the Hutton/Ranse line argues the crowd's REASON for coming (worship, competition, intoxication-adjacent celebration) is itself a predictor - the academic version of the Purple Guide's crowd-mood variable and Zeitz's crowd-behavior review. Practically it justifies pre-event health messaging tuned to the audience cohort as a medical-plan component, the cheapest intervention in the entire planning stack. Anchors the harm-reduction shelf with Ranse/Hutton vignettes and Munn.
Key findings
- Audience motivation profiles differ across festival, religious, and sporting events
- Motivations predict expectable behaviors and health impacts - a planning input
- Cohort-tailored health promotion and safety messaging proposed as core event components
- Behavioral understanding positioned as a patient-presentation reduction strategy
Read the paper
- Publisher (DOI) ↗may be paywalled
- PubMed ↗abstract · free