Today’s guest post is from Torplus Yomnak, Jake Pattaratanakul, Apichart Kanarattanavong, Thanee Chaiwat, and Charoen Sutuktis of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

A team at Chulalongkorn University recently undertook a research project to examine the factors that increase public participation in anticorruption efforts, so as to develop a more effective communication strategy to promote public participation. (The final paper is currently only available in Thai, though an English translation is in progress, and a summary of the work can be found here.) The study employed a concept used in marketing research called “segmentation,” which seeks to identify latent classes of people—sorted by various characteristics and indicators—who will be more responsive to particular kinds of messaging. In marketing research, the idea is to identify which potential consumers will be most responsive to certain marketing strategies. The same research techniques can be used to classify different segments of the public by their likely responsiveness to anticorruption messaging (or to different kinds of anticorruption messaging).