Summary
In the near future, police agencies across Canada are expected to experience a serious staffing crisis. One way to help alleviate this crisis is to encourage more young people to consider policing as a profession, particularly since research has shown that many youth are not interested in policing as a career. The primary goal of this thesis was to explore the possibility of using the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion to guide the development and evaluation of police recruitment messages. Across two studies, the Elaboration Likelihood Model was tested by examining the effects of message quality, source credibility, and argument quantity on attitudes towards policing as a career under different conditions of elaboration likelihood (i.e., message processing). In contrast to what was predicted, the studies failed to find any of the expected effects. While these results do not suggest that the ELM generalizes to the domain of police recruitment, it is still too early to abandon the possibility that this model of persuasion may have value in this applied context. Potential explanations for the null findings are discussed as well as important avenues for future research.