Abstract
The paper investigates the thematic patterns of health awareness campaigns made during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim is to scrutinize the types of themes used in such prosocial advertisements by analyzing the theme placement and the elements inside those themes. COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in 2020 due to which health organizations proceeded to spread warnings and health awareness campaigns. In these circumstances, the language of these campaigns played a significant role in delivering the message to the people. In total, 75 posts were taken from official Instagram accounts of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) between March 21st, 2020 and June 21st, 2020. In this mixed-method study, a quantitative method has been used to obtain the ratio of unmarked and marked themes present in the data, which are further analysed qualitatively with Halliday’s (1994) theme-rheme model. We found that the majority of the clauses use unmarked themes, while marked themes are not as frequent. Through the preference of simple Theme over multiple Theme, complex language structure (clause-complex) has been avoided. This shows the awareness of respective organizations regarding the critical role language plays in influencing the audience, especially during a global health crisis.
Highlights
Public awareness campaigns regarding the health of the public need to be constructed in an understandable way, and at the same time, it gets the right message across to the reader
The posts are further delimited to the ones that had precautionary measures written in their captions, as opposed to ones with attached links. This narrowed down the posts made between March 21st, 2020 and June 21st, 2020. 50 posts are collected from the official account of Centre for Disease Control (CDC) whereas only 25 posts are collected from the official account of World Health Organization (WHO) as the latter had lesser posts related to COVID-19 during the selected period
The study aimed to investigate the types of themes used in public health awareness campaigns and how they highlight the seriousness of COVID-19
Summary
Public awareness campaigns regarding the health of the public need to be constructed in an understandable way, and at the same time, it gets the right message across to the reader. Coronavirus was declared as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020. A paper examining the social media engagement of health organizations found that social media platforms can establish meaningful communication with the people in times of global health crises (Guidry, Jin, Orr, Messner, & Meganck, 2017). It was more critical than ever that awareness campaigns avoid any further confusion, as according to one study in 2020, misinformation regarding the coronavirus had been pervasive on social media (Rafi, 2020)
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