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Involvement is a commonly invoked concept to better understand the situations under which individuals are more or less likely to be persuaded (Johnson and Eagly 1989). Though conceptual definitions of involvement are varied (cf. Allport 1943; Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Johnson and Eagly 1989; Petty and Cacioppo 1986), the term involvement has broadly been defined as the extent to which a topic or issue is considered personally relevant or significant to an individual (Perloff 2003). Several theories of persuasion – including social judgment theory (Sherif and Hovland 1961; Sherif, Sherif, and Nebergall 1965), the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), and the heuristic‐systematic model (Chaiken 1980) – posit that involvement is a fundamental variable affecting how individuals process and respond to persuasive messages. Despite widespread agreement that involvement affects message processing, the directionality of its influence is variable. For instance, according to social judgment theory (Sherif and Hovland 1961; Sherif et al. 1965), involvement is hypothesized to have a direct, albeit negative, effect on attitude change. In contrast, the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) posits that involvement is positively associated with an individual’s elaboration motivation, or desire to engage in issue‐relevant thinking about a topic (see O’Keefe 2013). These mixed findings propelled researchers to develop more nuanced conceptualizations for the involvement construct.

In their meta‐analysis of the effects of involvement on persuasion, Johnson and Eagly (1989) argued that involvement is a multidimensional construct comprising three distinct types of involvement: value‐relevant involvement, impression‐relevant involvement, and outcome‐relevant involvement. Johnson and Eagly (1989) contend that these different types of involvement activate different “aspect[s] of the message recipients’ self‐concept” (p. 290). Accordingly, the persuasive effects of each type of involvement are dependent on the aspect of the self that is activated by the persuasive message. Cho and Boster (2005) validated a measure for assessing Johnson and Eagly’s (1989) three involvement types. Cho and Boster’s (2005) involvement measures have received support across various topics and populations (Lapinski, Zhuang, Koh, and Shi 2017; Marshall, Reinhart, Feeley, Tutzauer, and Anker 2008; Pfau et al. 2010; Quick and Heiss 2009).

The first type of involvement identified by Johnson and Eagly (1989) is value‐relevant involvement. Value‐relevant involvement represents the relationship between an attitude object and an individual’s enduring values. In Johnson and Eagly’s (1989) words, value‐relevant involvement is “the psychological state that is created by the activation of attitudes that are linked to important values” (p. 290). These values refer to the traits and ideals that are particularly salient to individuals and correspondingly are used by individuals in defining their self‐concept. Value‐relevant involvement is analogous to ego‐involvement as originally studied by Sherif and his colleagues (Sherif and Cantril 1947; Sherif and Hovland 1961; Sherif et al. 1965). In their meta‐analysis, Johnson and Eagly (1989) concluded that the effects of value‐relevant involvement on persuasion are quite straightforward. Individuals who are highly value‐involved are harder to persuade than those who have low value‐involvement, although this can be overcome with strong arguments. In line with Johnson and Eagly’s (1989) finding, subsequent research has demonstrated that individuals who have high value‐relevant involvement in an issue are in fact more difficult to persuade (Cho and Boster 2005; Pfau et al. 2010).

The second type of involvement identified by Johnson and Eagly (1989) is impression‐relevant involvement. Impression‐relevant involvement refers to concerns about self‐presentation, social desirability, and identity management. High impression‐relevant involved individuals are concerned with “holding an opinion that is socially acceptable” (Johnson and Eagly 1989, p. 291), and often have more flexible or less extreme positions on topics. In contrast to value‐relevant involvement, individuals high in impression‐relevant involvement are motivated to behave in a manner that is considered acceptable by others (Cho and Boster 2005), whereas high value‐relevant involved individuals tend to behave in a way that is consistent with their own beliefs (Lapinski et al. 2017). Correspondingly, high levels of impression‐relevant involvement have been found to be associated with other‐directedness (Cho and Boster 2005), the level to which individuals have concerns for “pleasing others, conforming to the social situation, and masking one’s true feelings” (Briggs, Cheek, and Buss 1980, p. 681). Of the three involvement types, impression‐relevant involvement has received the least amount of academic investigation. Furthermore, research examining impression‐relevant involvement (Lapinski et al. 2017; Marshall et al. 2008; Pfau et al. 2010; Quick and Heiss 2009) has often failed to find support for impression‐relevant involvement’s persuasive function as specified by Johnson and Eagly (1989).

The final type of involvement identified by Johnson and Eagly (1989) is outcome‐relevant involvement. Outcome‐relevant involvement refers to the relevance of the issue to an individual’s important goals or outcomes. In short, if an issue or topic potentially will help an individual achieve some goal, she or he is said to have high outcome‐relevant involvement (Johnson and Eagly 1989). Outcome‐relevant involvement is conceptually similar to Petty and Cacioppo’s (1979) concept of issue involvement, defined as “the extent to which the attitudinal issue under consideration is of personal importance” (p. 1915). Research on the role of outcome‐relevant involvement on persuasion has been somewhat inconsistent, with findings suggesting that outcome‐relevant involvement can both enhance and inhibit attitude change (Cho and Boster 2005; Maio and Olson 1995). These inconsistent findings can be best explained by the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), which proposes that as outcome‐relevant involvement prompts greater message processing, attitude change should be expected only when strong persuasive messages are presented. In support of this reasoning, research has found that individuals with high outcome‐relevant involvement engage in more information seeking (Cho and Boster 2005; Quick and Heiss 2009) and more objective cognitive processing (Hubbell, Mitchell, and Gee 2001; Levin, Nichols, and Johnson 2000).

Health communicators can benefit by considering audience members’ involvement in an issue, given the central role involvement plays in message processing and attitude change. Formative research into a target audience’s type and level of involvement in an issue allows for subsequent audience segmentation and message tailoring. One illustrating example of this comes from Marshall and colleagues (2008) who examined college students’ impression‐, outcome‐, and value‐relevant involvement for alcohol use (as well as several other health behaviors). Though participants had similar (and relatively high) levels of involvement for alcohol use, Marshall and colleagues (2008) found that outcome‐relevant involvement was positively associated with alcohol use, whereas value‐relevant involvement was negatively associated with alcohol use, and impression‐relevant involvement was unrelated with alcohol use. From a message design standpoint, this negative relationship between value‐relevant involvement and drinking suggests that anti‐drinking messages that resonate with college students’ existing values (e.g. healthy lifestyle) represent a potentially fruitful avenue for health communication efforts. Furthermore, given the positive association between outcome‐relevant involvement and drinking, these results suggest that social marketing efforts will likely benefit from finding new and innovative ways to convey the negative effects of alcohol use, given the existence of perceived positive benefits of alcohol use (e.g. socialization, stress management; Marshall et al. 2008). With an overview of involvement provided, we next move to the concept of health literacy.