Utilization of Symbolic Interactionism, Pragmatism, and Social Constructionism in Development Communication Campaigns in Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative case study analysed the utilization of symbolic interactionism, pragmatism, and social constructionism in recent development communication campaigns in Nigeria. A dataset of 87 campaigns over the last 5 years across rural, urban, northern, southern, and coastal regions was compiled. Deductive and inductive thematic analysis examined shared meanings, communicative actions towards desired ends, socially constructed representations, and additional context-specific patterns. These theoretical lenses provide valuable insights into target audiences, messaging techniques, and facilitating behavioural and social change. Symbolic interactionism focuses on shared meanings arising through social interactions and informs the cultural framing of campaign messages. Pragmatism suggests appealing to the practical impacts on people’s lives rather than abstract principles to motivate change. Finally, social constructionism sees societal issues as constructed through discourse, which campaigns can influence through strategic communication. Together, these three perspectives offer a conceptual toolkit for designing resonant campaigns, grounded in the local context, that raise awareness on issues like poverty, health, and gender equality while also shaping public discourse and norms in the longer term. Further scholarship on practical applications of these theories can improve developmental outcomes in Nigeria. This desk analysis provides a foundation for future empirical studies on campaign design and reception, and sets an agenda for theory-driven communication strategies that create meaningful social change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".