Care for Aging Parents in Social Advertising: Peculiarities of Perception of Teenagers and Their Parents

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study of social advertising broadcasting the value of adult children's care for their elderly parents. In order to determine the potential impact of advertising on the consumer, a psychological analysis of two commercials was carried out: “Main Investment” and “What Will Remain”. It is shown that the traditional value of “filial care” has lost its unconditional character and is understood as a “proportional response” to the care previously shown by parents for their children. To test hypotheses about the different effects on the viewer of advertising narratives presenting “positive” and “negative” models of “care”, as well as the fact that social attitudes and personal experience of interaction in the consumer family influence their understanding of the situations depicted in advertising. We conducted an empirical study with 203 participants: 124 adolescents (M = 14, SD = 2.1) and 79 parents (M = 43, SD = 12.2). Features of perception of advertising images were carried out using the method of specialized semantic differential. To assess intergenerational relationships in the families of the subjects, the “Methodology for analyzing family relationships” and the questionnaire “Adolescents about parents” were used. The obtained data was analyzed using mathematical statistics methods. The study found a transformation of traditional ideas of sub-sprouts about parents - their images are endowed with low values of “caring” and “prestige”. We found the dependence of semantic assessment of advertising images of adult children and their elderly parents in need of help on the experience of child-parent relations in the consumer family. We revealed that in the perception of parents, “care” and “prestige” have an inverse relationship. We argue that the “positive” model of the discursive formula of “reciprocal care” implemented in social advertising solves the problem of translating the value of caring for elderly parents to a greater extent than “negative”. Keywords. Social advertising, media, elderly parents, teenagers, mother, father, attitude, semantics, narrative, image.