Year: 2010
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The US is one of only two countries in which Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising is currently permitted.There are ongoing calls in Congress to ban the practice, because of concerns that it may lead to the inappropriate diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and to higher prices for medicines.In this paper, we study the influence of print DTCA for antidepressants by studying how they affect the decision to seek physician care.We add to the literature because prior work in this area has only been able to link market level (or national) advertising to individual level physician visits, whereas our exposure comes from individual measures of advertising exposure.Our main data set is the Simmons National Consumer Survey (NCS), a nationally representative cross-sectional survey covering 2003-2007.I create my independent variable by linking reports in the NCS and magazine reading habits with data from other databases that tells me what ads appeared in those shows or magazines.NCS asks how often the respondent read a specific magazine.Respondents reported how many issues of each magazine they read of the past four issues; I extrapolate for the entire year from this, assuming that the reading pattern of the last 4 issues is indicative of behavior during that past year.Data on DTC print advertisements were taken from a database created at Cornell University containing a digital representation of every pharmaceutical advertisement that appeared between the time period in 26 of the top read consumer magazines in the United States, which in turn represents approximately 60% of readership data in the NCS.Among the 105,299 respondents to the NCS on whom I have data, the average exposure to antidepressant print ads is 5.43 advertisements.I examine the causal effect exposure to antidepressant advertisements number on the likelihood of visiting a healthcare practitioner (general/family practitioners, nurse practitioners, and internist) in the last 12 months in the NCS.I estimate a falsification test using a dependent variable that should not be affected by antidepressant ads, visits to podiatrists.The richness of the data allows me to specify a model in which the variation in ad exposure used to estimate the key parameters are orthogonal to unobservables about the individual that may be correlated with both ad exposure and with care seeking behavior, controlling for factors used by marketers in targeting ads.
Source: eCommons (Cornell University)
Author: Jonathan Cantor
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Issues, ethics and legal aspects
Field: Nursing
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1599747075