Week 1: Trouble With Methods

Welcome back to my blog! This was my first week of independent research and the week for narrowing down my research methodology. Time management was difficult, but after a few days of procrastinating, it was finally time to work.

To recap, my project aims to analyze and understand the disparity that exists in e-cigarette advertising in how companies’ ads on social media show different latent messaging than the statements given by companies. This difference exists both because large tobacco companies often own e-cigarette companies and because positioning vapes as a health tool relaxes regulations on products. Despite this, the evidence of the harms is stacking up against claims of e-cigarettes as beneficial smoking cessation tools. Thus, the risk of misinformation that comes from teens receiving messaging that doesn’t align with a company’s PR opens avenues for increased youth addiction and further misunderstandings.

This week, my goal was to conquer how to effectively compare these kinds of “messaging” while honoring the method of applying content analysis. The big question to answer was how to bridge these two different variables. Initially, I had the impression that the only way to complete this was to assign each advertisement I selected with a youth appeal that advertisements used to target youth. From the literature I read, I understood that these were social appeals, device characteristic appeals, health appeals, character appeals, and flavor appeals. My idea was to assign ads with their respective appeal and somehow compare this to the message given by a company (for instance, JUUL’s: “Juul Labs is on a mission to transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminate their use, and combat underage usage”). However, this left a considerable gap between them. How would I effectively consider these two different variables in the same context?

My answer was to reverse the way I coded! If I instead created a pathway from appeals to messages, it would be much easier to prevent subjectivity in my study. Though that sounds a bit convoluted, let me explain!

There are 5 appeals I have established, each with its own definition of what is contained in an advertisement (ex: people in social settings, images of food, etc). Beyond this, each appeal has a message that it sends (“vaping is socially acceptable”, “vaping is healthy”, etc). These can easily be compared with the messaging that a company provides. Clearly, JUUL’s mission would not align with these statements if they were present in their advertisements, indicating some level of misinformation.

That’s the gist of the progress I made this week! Next week, I’ll be working on starting my presentation slides and compiling data. See you next time!