Impact of Media on Creating Health Awareness

Abstract

The paper attempts to identify the impact of media on creating health awareness and on changing people’s behaviour towards their health. This impact needs to be measured for the people belonging to lower and lower-middle income category, who do not have access to all sources of information. Keeping this in mind, this study has been conducted in Ramdev Nagar, one of the urban slums of Ahmedabad. The paper looks into these issues with the help of qualitative interviews and brings out a positive relation between media advertising and the level of awareness among people. The acceptance of people to take better precautionary measures justifies the positive impact of media, that has brought a change in their behaviour towards health. Not only the advertisements given by Government but also the ones given by private companies to sell their products like mosquito repellents etc have contributed to the increased awareness level among people. Use of celebrities in advertisements has been found to have a great influence on the ad recalls especially among the younger population.