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Behaviors and Beliefs Held by Australians about Asylum Seekers

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This report was commissioned to examine the behaviours and beliefs held by Australians in regards to the people identified as asylum seekers who arrive in Australia in search of humanitarian aid.

The research draws attention to different newspaper commentators and evidence found by the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre that displays an overall negative and ill-informed opinions regarding asylum seekers. Further investigation revealed that many Australians, because of political jargon and journalistic hate-mongering, aren’t fully informed on asylum seekers, their human rights, and the expectation that Australian, as a signatory to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, will assist them when they have been forced to flee from …show more content…

To this end, the goals of social marketing, as opposed to commercial marketing, is to elicit positive changes in the behaviours and opinions of the population that will positively benefit society on a local, national and international level.

When using social marketing strategy to promote behaviour change amongst a specific target market, certain predisposed theories can be used to create a starting point for developing a social marketing program (Andreasen, 1995). A theory identified by Hastings (2007) that that best fits the goals of changing Australian society’s perceptions on asylum seekers is the Social Cognitive Theory. The Social Cognitive Theory hypothesises that human behaviour is determined by a collection of internal personal factors intertwined with environmental factors that help create opinions and behaviours towards issues (Maibach and Cotton, 1995).

The Social Cognitive Theory identifies the influences of peers, family members, personal characteristics and societal norms and culture as the main determinants of a person’s opinion (Hastings, 2007, Bandura, 1986). It identifies the reciprocal relationship between personal and environmental factors as an important factor that affect a person’s beliefs, opinions and behaviours toward a certain social issue. The concept of Social Cognitive Theory points out that, to change the perceptions and behaviour of the target

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