Smoke, Switch, Quit : A corpus-assisted investigation of tobacco industry and health bodies’ language around tobacco use

Fitzpatrick, Iona and Sun, Xinmei (2024) Smoke, Switch, Quit : A corpus-assisted investigation of tobacco industry and health bodies’ language around tobacco use. In: 7th Corpora & Discourse International Conference, 2024-07-17 - 2024-07-19.

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Abstract

Language relating to tobacco products used by transnational corporations, the scientific community and the public do not always overlap (van Druten et al., 2022). Gaps in understanding impact the effectiveness of the communication of health risks to the public and can provide opportunities for the tobacco industry to obfuscate tobacco product-related harms, manipulate public opinions and derail legislative processes relating to tobacco use. (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022, Freeman et al., 2018). Corpus-based methods have previously been applied to analyses of patient and practitioner language, highlighting how linguistic choices impact dynamics of responsibility in the context of health (Adolphs, et al. 2004; Berg, et al., 2021). Similarly, differences in the use and understanding of certain phrases relating to public health can stifle efforts to enact effective policy solutions and inhibit behaviour change (amongst tobacco consumers for example). This project investigates the use of tobacco product-related terms by three impacted groups: the tobacco industry, health bodies and the general public. The primary aim of this work is to contribute to the body of work examining corporate use of language and the role of transnational corporations in the shaping of cultural and behavioural norms. We use a corpus-based approach to examine two tailor-made corpora and two open-source public corpora representing the three groups: 1) reports and web content produced by the tobacco companies BAT and PMI (~ 6 million words); 2) guidelines produced by the health bodies WHO, CDC, NHS and NICE (~ 2 million words); 3) the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), representing the general public’s language use. We explore differences in how tobacco product-related terms were used between the three groups, how their uses change over time (2003-2023), and assess implications for the negotiation of responsibility and accountability for product use, cessation and regulation. Focusing on terms such as ‘smok*’, ‘quit*’, ‘cessation’, ‘switch*’, ‘vap*’, ‘addict*’ and ‘relaps*’, we employ techniques including concordances, collocation and usage fluctuation analysis. The findings revealed disparities between the way tobacco companies and health bodies define and talk about product use. In their narritivisation of cessation-related activities, tobacco companies suggest switching to e-cigarettes is a form of quitting, whereas the health bodies define ‘quit’ as quitting all forms of tobacco products. Discourses of personal responsibilities to quit/switch and corporate responsibilities to provide products with a lower risk than cigarettes are found to be prominent in the tobacco industry corpus. Analyses also revealed similarities in the language used by tobacco companies and the general public, especially in relation to vaping. By tracking the fluctuations in frequencies and changes in collocation profiles of the terms of interest, we uncovered key turning points where discourses around newer tobacco products emerge and meaning associations with quitting and product-use begin to change. Our findings highlight ongoing challenges in the way key groups understand tobacco products and their related behaviours. By uncovering the discrepancies and similarities in how tobacco companies talk about smoking and cessation behaviours compared with health bodies and the public, we have identified areas where improved clarity of messaging, specifically related to shared understandings, is needed.