Many voices: Finnish students’ criteria for evaluating alcohol and drug educational videos

Abstract

Since the 1980s, videos and other audio-visual materials have been popular in alcohol and drug prevention programs targeting young people. The video format has provided an opportunity to combine the attractiveness of (initially) novel technology with presentation styles assumed to captivate the interest of young audiences. Audio-visual materials seem to appeal to young people; a survey conducted in the United States, examining students' preferences regarding classroom drug education, found video and movie presentations to be among the most popular methods (Glassford & al., 1991). In Finland, videos and television programs were the most widely used type of materials in classroom drug education in the early 1990s. A large proportion of teachers wished that audio-visual materials would be made even more readily available. One reason for this was that audio-visual materials are easy to use when the teacher is not too familiar with the subject matter (Heikkinen & Kontula, 1992). Little seems to be known about the reasons behind students' interest in audio-visual materials, or about their preferences regarding the style or content of such products. This article reports findings from a study in which the framework of reception analysis has been used to examine the criteria used by Finnish students to evaluate two videos dealing with alcohol and drug use. The study also sought inspiration from user-centered research on information seeking. In both fields, the focus is on real-life moments in which people interact with cultural products or other sources of information; members of the audience are seen as active subjects who use cultural products selectively to serve their interests and needs. Empirical research on the reception of literature (Holub, 1984; Segers, 1985) or television programs (Seiter & al., 1989; Liebes & Katz, 1990; Jensen, 1991; Morley, 1992) is a loose framework that groups together works stemming from different theoretical origins and emphasizing different research methods. What the works have in common is a general research strategy and a set of basic assumptions regarding the active and productive process of reception. Reception in a broad sense refers to recipients' perceptions and interpretations of a text and responses to it. The process of reception is fueled by the content, structure and form of the text, and by the recipients' experiences of social reality, including other cultural products. The reception of any given text among any given audience is likely to be a combination of shared patterns and inter-individual variation. Inter-individual variation stems from differences in the recipients' orientations and cultural competencies formed in the course of their lives. Shared patterns stem from shared aspects of the social and cultural context, and from features of the text that guide the recipients in certain directions. User-centered research on information seeking has looked at the functioning of information systems from the informationseeking subjects' perspective (Chen & Hernon, 1982; Dervin & Nilan, 1986; Wilson 1994). Empirical studies have examined people's information-seeking strategies as well as their views and experiences of the usefulness of different sources and types of information. Like reception analysis, user-centered research on information seeking is an approach that brings together studies representing different theoretical and methodological orientations. Within this framework, particularly some works by Brenda Dervin (1981, 1989, 1991 & 1992) have provided fruitful ideas for analyzing students' views of alcohol/drug educational videos. This article describes first the research material and methods that were used and then presents findings based on qualitative analysis on the one hand and on quantitative examination on the other. In the last sections, the findings are discussed in the light of the frameworks of reception analysis and information-seeking research. …