Date of Award
8-1997
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Mass Communications: M.S.
Department
Mass Communication
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
Marjorie Fish
Second Advisor
Gretchen Starks-Martin
Third Advisor
Bassey Eyo
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Social Media, Health Care, Breast Cancer, Females, Impact
Abstract
Breast cancer is the second major cause of death in women, yet little research exists that examines the content of the messages that women readers of magazines receive about the disease.
The advent of the women's health movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s initiated radical social change in which women demanded greater access to health care information. Historically, women's health messages, specifically those about breast cancer, were communicated from a mechanistic-structural approach. The women's health movement implemented a more holistic-social approach to breast cancer and women's health in general.
This research examined selected samples of three highly circulated popular women's magazines and the New York Times pre- and post- the women's movement during 1964 to 1994.
A textual analysis of breast cancer articles was conducted to examine thematic units characteristic of mechanistic-structural and holistic-social communication. Thematic units are recurring assertions made by communicators such as repeat patterns of ideas.
Significant results were identified in two areas of analysis: I) an increase in the number of articles addressing the topic of breast cancer during the time period studied, and 2) an increase in the percent of thematic units characteristics of holistic-social marketing communication.
Data indicate there has been both an increase in the quantity and a shift in the quality or type of information on breast cancer as presented in the data. The increase in the quantity is substantiated by more than a 250% increase in both the number of articles and thematic units about breast cancer from 1964 to 1994. The data show a less dramatic, though significant, shift away from mechanistic-structural and toward holistic-social marketing in mass media breast cancer messages during the period studied.
Factors contributing to the increase in quantity of breast cancer messages could be: 1) the activism of the women's health movement; 2) a call for more valid research on the topic of breast cancer; 3) a campaign to create a public perception of breast cancer as a political, versus a women's, issue; and 4) the aging of the feminist leadership of the women's movement resulting in increased awareness of and personal experience with breast cancer.
Data reveal that while there has been an increase in the percent of thematic units characteristic of holistic-social marketing, the increase is not nearly as dramatic as the quantitative increase. In light of this discouraging finding, this researcher offers the following contributing factors to this significant, though minimal, qualitative shift: 1) the approaches to breast cancer messages continue to focus on the most common methods of addressing the disease; and 2) the research and practice of medicine, historically and currently, denigrate women's health issues which may, in fact, be caused by institutional medicine maintaining a male-dominated status-quo which exists within a paternalistic hierarchy.
Recommended Citation
Overland, Maribeth, "The Impact of Social Marketing in Breast Cancer Communication: A Thematic Analysis of Health Care Communication in the Media" (1997). Culminating Projects in Mass Communications. 2.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/comm_etds/2
