SOC 1500 Reserach Plan & Outline

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University of Pittsburgh *

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1500

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Communications

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Apr 3, 2024

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Research Plan & Outline Darin Fields, Alex Freiwald, Victoria Hart, Tejis Ranganath, Chenhao Sun Research Plan: We intend to answer our questions about the themes surrounding mental health and mental illness that privatized web-based therapy services are trying to convey to consumers through a thematic content analysis. The data for this study will be advertisements from and for companies with a large volume of advertising on popular web-based mediums (podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.) including BetterHelp, Hers/Hims, Headspace, and Talkspace. The sample for this study will be selected ads from these companies that have circulated in the past three years. Content analysis is best suited to answer our question as it allows us to take a deeper look at what these companies are saying to their prospective customers. Analyzing several different advertisements for a similar product will aid in discovering what general themes and beliefs privatized companies have about mental health and illness and how they are attempting to attract customers. We will take an inductive iterative approach to our coding in that we will start looking at specific aspects of ads, and gradually build toward broader observations. A discovery-based approach is better for our topic due to a lack of research on these services as almost all of these companies have been founded in the last decade. Despite our hypotheses, we decided it would be better to approach with an open mind. We will start with all members of the team freely coding advertisements, taking largely descriptive codes and notes. From there we will come together and discuss our respective descriptive codes/notes, and generate themes and trends displayed

across the data (Thematic coding). Once themes are identified, we will re-code based on our new scheme as well as introduce new material to be coded with these thematic codes. Video and auditory ads will be converted into transcripts (if not already available) and coded using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis service provided for free by the University software service. Solely visual ads and the visual aspects of video ads will be collected as well and also coded in NVivo, possibly with an alternative coding scheme more applicable to visual media. We aim to collect between fifteen and twenty-five unique advertisements in total. We will find this data by doing a broad search across the internet and the various platforms these advertisements run on (i.e. YouTube, most popular podcasts, etc.). Search terms will include the names of the respective companies, “web-based therapy”, names of companies + “ad”. Given that we are looking for advertisements targeted at consumers, we do not anticipate difficulty in accessing this data. YouTube provides auto-generated transcripts for most videos, which allows us to simply copy and paste these into Nvivo. Nvivo also allows for the coding of images and video, so those will be coded through Nvivo as well. In this plan and within our research question, there are a few specific terms that are implicated and must be carefully defined. First: for-profit web-based mental health services. This is already a well-defined term. However, the nuance that we will need to explain is that the services are provided outside of any connection to a brick-and-mortar healthcare institution. The service must be entirely web-based, excluding services that have optional online therapy in addition to an office space. This definition will be strictly held as we collect advertisements for the analysis. The next term we mention is “themes” or the themes found in the advertisements we analyze. To avoid expectation bias (i.e. experimenters expecting to find certain themes in the

advertisements), this term will come to be defined as themes revealed through our discovery- based method, rather than attempting to define it now. Based on our initial findings, we will attempt to operationalize a few common themes (i.e. recurring ideas or methods that appear in multiple advertisements across various services). As our report is developed, these will be defined and advertisements will be categorized into those that express certain themes and those that express others. The final term that is necessary to be defined for our report is “medical discourse” surrounding mental health and “medically-driven treatments” for mental health issues. In order for a treatment or discourse to be specified as “medical”, we will specifically be referencing the DSM-V and/or peer-reviewed evidence-based sources published in medical journals. Outline of Research Report: ● Introduction ○ Hook/introduction ■ Basic statistics about mental health crisis and how society as a whole has responded ● Surgeon general’s report? ■ Introduction of privatized web-based mental health services- when they started popping up, what they do, different companies, average costs etc. ○ Research Questions and Hypotheses ■ RQ1) What types of themes about mental health and mental illness are these services trying to convey to consumers? ● H1) Companies will show a thematic trend of framing mental illness as fixable, and another aspect of the self that can be optimized via consumption. There will be a trend of ignoring structural and systemic influences on negative mental health. ■ RQ2) How are the themes in these advertisements compared to the medical discourse around mental health and mental health treatment?

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