Week 5

Like many others who have already posted their blogs, I also enjoyed the video on the research that goes on behind the scenes as commercials/advertisements are created. I very rarely devote my full attention to commercials, but my tv is almost always on when I am home, so unless the advertisers use a catchy auditory message, they will not be reaching me! I am amazed at how many do use good songs, funny jokes, etc., but do not bother to say the name of the product auditorily in the commercial. That tactic is probably used to get viewers to look at the screen out of curiosity and pay attention, but that doesn't work for me, so it probably doesn't work for others, either. The few commercials that I do see drive me crazy because they usually have NOTHING to do with the product they are advertising - kind of like the 7up commercial with the butterfly girl we saw in the in-class video. Maybe it's just me, and most people are able to connect flying insects with carbonated beverages...
Anyway, another thing that I have been thinking about related to advertisting health messages is something that we discussed in my Behavioral Medicine Seminar a couple of weeks ago, when the topic was obesity. We were talking about ways to get people to exercise - joining and going to the gym being one of the most automatic types of exercise we wanted to promote. Most commercials/advertisements for gyms are for the big chain ones like 24-Hour Fitness, and they definitely use the sex appeal (back-door or wrong way approach). Although they are appealing to younger, hipper crowds, they are missing a much larger segment of the population - namely, middle-aged and older people who are comparatively "average" and probably overweight, etc. If 24-Hour Fitness is happy with their membership numbers and "types" of members, that's fine for them. But no one is reaching out to the majority of the population - the people who REALLY NEED to go to the gym because of potential or existing health problems. When these people see the commercials of thin and/or buff, young individuals, they assume that all gym-goers (at all gyms) look like those people. As a result, they are intimidated, insecure, and ashamed of their bodies, so they don't even want to reveal their bodies in public by taking a walk in their neighborhood, let alone at the gym. So, in my opinion, the public health realm has gone too far with the "wrong-way" approach in this case, and perhaps they should attempt a "right-way" message for joining a gym (e.g., YMCA, Curves, etc.). How about a commercial with people of average weight (read: overweight or obese in America, where that's the average) working out and talking about how much better they feel and healthier they are, without even talking about the side effect of losing weight along the way? I think I'll get started on that...tomorrow.

Week 4

Again, class was very interesting this week. I do really enjoy the lack of Power Point in this class. At first I was pretty surprised that we didn't have slides since Dr. Engelberg is so into media, but now I understand why he refrains from using PP for class lectures. This is only my second professor in graduate school so far who has not used PP, and I have to say that I pay a lot closer attention in class because of it. We actually have to TAKE OUR OWN NOTES - HEAVEN FORBID!!! I don't even remember when PP began to become popular in teaching, but I do know that since its implementation, I am much more likely to work on something else or zone out in class when I know that I can always refer back to my slides later. I do think that some PP presentations can still be presented in an interesting manner. However, I experienced one that was terrible (even though the topic was very interesting) first thing Tuesday morning - the day after this week's class. I was shocked that one of my supervisors had such a terrible presentation. She literally read from her slides and did not incorporate any additional info. on most of them. She also seemed surprised by some of the slides' content, even though she had made the slides herself. I was embarrassed for her, really.
Anyway, the rest of the class was fine, too, but I had done the active listening exercise one too many times in other psych. courses, so that was not much fun for me. Seeing that others got a lot out of it was interesting, though. It is a good exercise when done for the first time!

Week 2

Today's class was full of an array of activities. Some of the highlights included comparing our definitions of communication and health communication from the "Code your own communication" assignment. Although the definitions did not seem to differ substantially, the numbers of total communication instances in different people's days did vary considerably. I believe this conundrum was primarily due to differences in how people spent the one day that they recorded - supporting the notion that one "experiment" is rarely reliable, no matter how well-designed it may be. Perhaps if we had each coded an entire week (or at least three days) and calculate the means, our numbers would have been more similar.
Another interesting activity was the group campaign idea presentations. My group (the "5-a-Dayer's") was asked to design a program targeting teens' nutrition. I liked our ideas and thought they should be implemented somewhere :) Maybe someday I'll take on such a large burden...ha, ha, ha!!! Listening to the other groups' ideas was very interesting. Funny how celebrity endorsement was very popular, but we tended to plan to bring celebrities in to reach out locally (a rather unlikely feat) rather than to (relatively) simply have them participate in a campaign by making a commercial or something, even though they would reach a much wider audience. I guess we all still tend to think along the lines of personalization in this modern world of mass media campaigns on the Internet and television.