UA Professor Receives Baskett Mosse Award For Her Extensive Research On Infomercials

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Dr. Jan LeBlanc Wicks, assistant professor of journalism, has received the Year 2000 Baskett Mosse Award for Faculty Development, presented by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

The award, which carries a cash prize, will be presented to Wicks during the AEJMC business meeting in Phoenix on Aug. 11 at the annual conference. The award recognizes an outstanding young or mid-career faculty member by providing a grant to support a development or enrichment activity.

"The selection committee was most impressed with the depth" of Wicks' vita as well as her project wrote Jennifer H. McGill, AEJMC executive director. The project Wicks submitted is "A Content Analysis of Infomercial Claims and Persuasive Techniques."

The goal of the content analysis, Wicks said, is to evaluate infomercials that were identified as deceptive by the Federal Trade Commission, along with others to be randomly videotaped from television and cable channels. The infomercials will be analyzed to see whether deceptive infomercials, as a group, tend to use the same kinds of misleading claims and persuasive techniques to sell products.

"I have developed a draft of the coding document and plan to conduct the study in the summer and fall of 2000," Wicks said.

"The FTC has already supplied me with video copies of deceptive infomercials to evaluate in this study in return for sharing the results. The results will help the FTC and television station managers to identify misleading infomercials," Wicks said.

Wicks also has a second goal to discover whether and how deceptive infomercials differ from non-misleading infomercials.

The Baskett Mosse Award was created in the early 1980s by AEJMC and the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications in memory of the late Baskett Mosse, executive secretary of the council for 26 years. It is designed to assist promising faculty from accredited schools, but it is not awarded automatically every year.