A COMMUNICATIVE ACT STUDY TO SUPPORT HEALTH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH ON TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS

The study in this paper seeks to examine the application of a communicative act study to investigate health messages about, for example, preventing disease and healthy living, on television advertisements. In interacting with those media including their content, audiences of the television program may perform “actions” such as looking at more closely to visual elements they see, paying more attention to audio element they hear, and paying more attention to visual and audio elements after pressing or touching any button of television devices. This is important to investigate as we often depend on those kinds of media of communication to disseminate and to get messages in relation to health. The use of those media for that purpose relates to recent discussions in mass media and communication in terms of, for example, how the media can help us to maintain ideas of positive effect of the media content on their audiences, more importantly how the media can motivate the audience to do something intended by “senders” of the message. A communicative act study, which focuses on people’s “performances of action”, might help us to examine possibilities of audiences’ “performances of action” since when the audiences interact with the media there might be “actions” which result from their understanding of the media including the media content. The study in this paper can expand investigations of relationship of the media and their audience in terms of using a communicative act study, as a supporting approach, in health communication research which can then contribute to the discussions of mass media and communication in terms of television advertisement about health issues.