THE EFFECT OF SELF-REGULATION ON THE ETHICAL CONDUCT OF TV DRUG ADVERTISING - 1973 TO 1983 (OVER-THE-COUNTER, COMMERCIALS, REGULATORY, OTC)

In the context of this study, self-regulation relates to self-imposed and voluntarily administered activities, conducted by private organizations, which are designed to promote fairness in OTC drug advertising. This study assessed the relationship between self-regulatory activity and the ethical conduct of TV drug advertising by comparing commercials selected from periods of varying self-regulation (e.g., 1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1983) against a standard of ethical conduct. The standard of ethical conduct was derived from the current literature and various codes of advertising practices. Operationally, the standard of ethical conduct consisted of an eight item instrument which addressed the following dimensions of the construct: truth, proper use instructions, informational content, taste, emotional appeal, misuse prohibitions, relevance and overall ethical quality. The instrument was applied to videotaped duplications of actual advertisements (N = 120) by panels of final year pharmacy and medical students who were trained to use the rating scales.;Substantively, the level of ethical conduct in advertising was judged to be essentially "fair" in all study years. The only dimension of ethical conduct shown to have changed over the period was the prevalence of proper use instructions, which demonstrated an improving trend but consistently was viewed as less than acceptable. Additional hypotheses failed to demonstrate statistically significant differences. These findings, although open to multiple interpretations, suggest that self-regulation has performed only satisfactorily over the period examined. While recognizing that the level of ethical conduct in drug advertising was not found to be grossly unacceptable, but further accepting that OCT drugs carry inherent health risks, there appears to be a considerable margin for improvement in the ethical quality of drug advertising.;The major hypothesis of this research postulated that self-regulation had been ineffective in improving the ethical conduct of advertising over time. Other hypotheses explored whether advertising for highly differentiated brands had been more ethical than that for highly undifferentiated brands; whether more effective brands exhibited higher levels of ethical conduct than less effective brands; and whether company origin affected ethical conduct.