Every document and picture tells a story: using internal corporate document reviews, semiotics, and content analysis to assess tobacco advertising.
In this article we present communication theory as a conceptual framework for conducting documents research on tobacco advertising strategies, and we discuss two methods for analysing advertisements: semiotics and content analysis. We provide concrete examples of how we have used tobacco industry documents archives and tobacco advertisement collections iteratively in our research to yield a synergistic analysis of these two complementary data sources. Tobacco promotion researchers should consider adopting these theoretical and methodological approaches.
Anderson
S J
SJ
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143-1390, USA.
Dewhirst
T
T
Ling
P M
PM
D000329:Advertising / Q000379:methods*; D003142:Communication; D004282:Documentation; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D008037:Linguistics; D012107:Research Design; D012907:Smoking; D019460:Tobacco Industry