Narratives, information and persuasion in online discussions of vaccinations
Narratives and information are often contrasted as rhetorical strategies for the achievement of persuasion. There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for a persuasive advantage of narrative vs. information in communication generally and health communication specifically. This advantage is explained in terms of a decrease in resistance to persuasion due to the cognitive and affective consequences of engagement with story-worlds.
This talk complements experimental work in this area by presenting a study that investigated the use of, and engagement with, narratives vs. information in five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet where contributors provide advice to a parent who is undecided about vaccinating their child against the Human Papillomavirus. The findings provide a new kind of evidence for a potential persuasive advantage of narrative in the context of health-related decision making.
Short biography
Prof Elena Semino (Lancaster University) is Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Fuzhou University, China. Fellow of the RSA and the Academy of Social Sciences. Her research interests in Health Communication include representations of autism and mental illness in fictional and non-fictional narratives; metaphor, cancer and the end of life; (figurative) language, creativity and chronic pain; metaphors for Covid-19; discourses around vaccinations.
She was a Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded project 'Questioning Vaccination Discourse: A Corpus-based Study' (Quo VaDis).
Registration
If you want to watch/listen to this SHEtalk on Zoom, please register here.
What are SHEtalks
SHEtalks are a serial of informal research seminars held at Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo. SHEtalks are research lunch lectures. The 2024 program was put together by researcher Gabriela Saldanha. Seminars take place at Thursdays at noon (GTM+1) unless otherwise specified. They may be delivered and attended in person or via zoom.
Please follow us on YouTube.
Subscribe
For newsletters on sustainable health and event invitations, please subscribe here.