I'm still ironing out the details, but for my final project I know I want to look at language usage in health communication. Specifically, I want to look at the way pharmaceutical drugs are marketed to the general public. At first my topic was too broad, and now, as I've begun to research, I'm fearing its too narrow so comments and responses are welcome.
For a long time I've been interested in the way we talk about medications and vaccines. In the United States we have pharmaceutical reps who sell certain drugs to doctors, but we also have medicine that is marketed directly to the common population. We often see TV commercials that are targeted to the general public asking us to self-diagnosis ourselves. "Do you suffer from tiredness or disinterest? You may be suffering from depression. Talk to your doctor about this drug." These advertisements are often written to sound like more of a public service announcement and less of an advertisement for a product. While I think talking about medicine this way has certain ethical issues, these advertisement writers know what they are doing because the ads are effective. I imagine pharmaceutical reps who are trying to sell the same products to doctors use very different language, and different persuasive techniques. I would love to look into this more, but I'm afraid the topic is too broad for this assignment.
Even when marketing drugs to people, different language is used for different populations. I'm thinking specificially of the Gardasil vaccine and how it is marketed to young women. Gardasil is a HPV vaccine recently introduced into the market. Women between the ages of 9 and 25 are encouraged to get the expensive three dose vaccine - it may even become a government mandated vaccine in a few years. It is supposed to prevent most types of cervical cancer - the kinds you can get from sexual activity. I've heard advertisements for Gardasil that sound VERY MUCH like a public service announcement. I've noticed that these ads sound different depending if the target audience is a 20+ sexually active woman compared to a preventative precaution for (hopefully not sexually active) nine-year-olds. I've seen print advertisements for college-aged women, high school women, and I've also seen literature that is obviously directed to mothers of 9-12 year-olds. I am interested in looking at these ads specifically, but, like I said, this topic may be too narrow.
I'm also interested in the way commercials use language like "4 out of 5 doctors agree" in their ads and how this has changed over time. I know that some doctors endorsed cigarettes thirty years ago.
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It might be effective to start with the too-broad topic first. It's always better to have too much than too little. You can always whittle things down, but you can't add things that aren't there.
ReplyDeleteBut you could also narrow down the first by widening the second. In other words, could you concetrate on scholarship about advertizing (and other discourse) that constructs issues about women's health?