Tufte Seminar: HIV/AIDS and the Challenges of Communication
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 Judith King. HIVAN Media office
Because every individual and organisation has a different and equally valid perspective on the HIV/AIDS epidemic - and there is no aspect of life that HIV/AIDS does not affect in some way - participatory approaches are needed in order to find viable solutions for prevention education strategies.
So says Dr Thomas Tufte of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Film and Media Studies, who was co-hosted early in October 2002 by the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies and DramAIDe on the Durban Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His seminar on current research around the challenges of communicating effectively with youth on HIV/AIDS issues to achieve measurable behaviour change drew much interest.
Dr Tufte's background is in cultural sociology, and his PhD was pursued within Media Studies (i.e. a thesis on how impoverished Brazilian women make sense of TV fiction such as soap operas, in particular, within the setting of Brazil's deeply Christian social context).
Stressing that the creation of effective messaging programmes should rely on contextual factors, Tufte spoke of three often competing paradigms inherent in the work of communicators in the struggle to prevent the spread of HIV infection. Briefly, these involve a focus on behaviour change, for which the individual's response is paramount; advocacy messages, which are directed at decisionmakers and opinion-leaders, and social change communications, which address development problems and how all three paradigms are necessarily interconnected.
Creating effective messaging and communication mechanisms around these three paradigms leads to questions such as: What are the structural determinants of the spread of HIV? How do we overcome the lack of conceptual clarity in defining the various terms of reference and underlying issues? Similarly, how do we integrate all of these in terms of objectives for solutions and so transcend the different and often competing agendas and methodologies?
Tufte submits that the study of social practices for effective reception analysis is vital, e.g. through ethnographic studies of how people make sense of media products and theory. He said that further study is needed on the national impact of such products and theory throughout all sectors and strata in society.
His current research is focused on the holistic evaluation of the range of existing communication campaigns targeting youth in South Africa, as well as the responses of the individual recipients of these messages. The subjects of this study are drawn from different school settings, and the methodology involves engaging with 15-year-old girls and boys separately. Group discussions and individual interviews cover the origin of the participants' attitudes and understanding of sex and sexuality, their levels of knowledge and sources of information on HIV/AIDS, as well as their preferences in and the context of their TV viewing.
The participants are given cameras with which they are asked to record their daily lives - where they go, who they are with, what they see, hear and think about - and two extracts of TV "edutainment" shows will be screened to them ('Yizo Yizo' and 'Soul City') followed by focus-group work.
It is hoped that the study will provide data that will clarify how the youths' sexual, gendered and general identities are formed, and to what extent TV plays a role in such formation. The project will then be broadened to involve a survey of more general responses to media campaigns.
Tufte concluded by recommending that a national forum be held, involving provincial and community stakeholders, to foster multisectoral interfacing around community responses to HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. The seminar participants agreed that such a forum would require strong and co-ordinated leadership that was visible and not divisive.
For more information, contact Dr Tufte at:
[email protected]
www.media.ku.dk/HIVAIDSComm
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