Kommunikativa strategier i texter om tobaksavvänjning : Innehåll, argumentation och modelläsare

Sammanfattning: The aim of this dissertation is to examine the content and communicative strategies in texts used in a project on tobacco policy delegated by the Swedish government to the National Institute of Public Health (“The National Tobacco Assignment 2008–2010”). The study uses communicative strategies as an umbrella term for the way the texts fulfil the political assignment through adaptation to suit different receivers in a discursive practice with set guidelines for communication between experts and users, and how these strategies are visible in the studied texts.The material consists of six guides for care personnel and ten brochures for smokers. The study is a text-focused critical discourse analysis combining methodological tools from different linguistic traditions. These are chiefly taken from critical text linguistics, new rhetoric, and sociosemiotics. The main question posed in the study is how the public authority’s assignment to influence people through the texts is combined with ideas about smokers’ empowerment. The investigation problematizes how the content and form of the texts relates to the authority’s assignment to exert influence, and to motivational interviewing as a discursive practice with an empowerment perspective on lifestyle changes.The analyses show that controlling ideas and notions about smokers’ empowerment exist in parallel in the government texts about smoking cessation. Controlling elements are most prominent in the sections of the guides about groups who, in the encounter with care personnel, do not show any interest or desire to quit smoking. In the studied brochures the controlling elements are most prominent in those aimed at operation ­patients, adolescents, and parents-to-be. Both groups of material – the guides and the brochures – nevertheless give the impression of being designed to be compatible with a patient-cent­red discursive practice. This is noticeable, for example, in the occurrence of associative and dissociative argumentation strategies which legitimize or tone down controlling elements.