Traditional Chinese Medicine

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Selective Exposure

According to Garrett (2008), individuals look for and accept information source that confirms and comforts their own beliefs and opinions. This is because people do not want to be told that they are wrong and they do not want their ideas to be challenged either (Klapper, 1960). As mentioned by Suresh (2003), this screening aspect depends on many factors such as age, accessibility, taboos, cultural acceptability and reach of media.

Selective Perception

As discussed by Cite. Co (2006), selective perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information in a way that favors one category or interpretation over another. Thus, selective perception is generally considered to represent a bias in information processing (Garrett, 2008). This depends on factors such as age, values, family and opinions. Also, it can be conclude that selective perception is influenced by social relationships (Suresh, 2003).

Selective Retention

The ability of an individual to retain certain messages in his mind while ignoring others is called selective retention, especially on things that they are broadly agree with (Revision World, n.d.). Based on Suresh (2003), this is caused by various psychological and physiological factors including culture, values, emotions and choice.

2.2 Theoretical Framework

Based on Sulistio and Heese (2015), there has been an increasing worldwide interest in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in recent years. Raffles Chinese Medicine (2016), claimed that sub-health is defined as a borderline state between being healthy and falling sick. There are many people who acknowledge the symptoms of sub-health that will affect their functional capabilities; however they do not take the symptoms seriously (Cai, n.d.). According to the World Health Organization (2016), 75% of us are actually living in a sub-healthy condition which increased pressures of living that is affecting the health of public. Rochelle and Marks (2011) stated that in order to enable more culturally appropriate and effective health provision, a better understanding of the influence of traditional cultural and health beliefs is required among the public. Therefore, UTAR has organized a TCM Health Fiesta to promote the importance of understanding sub-health (Traditional Chinese Medicine Society, 2016).

CHAPTER 3 – METHODOLOGY

3.1 Introduction

There are a total of three approaches to conduct a research, which are qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Different approaches serve different purposes depending on the objectives and requirements of the research. Quantitative research examines the relationship with variables (Creswell, 2014), by generalizing the findings in a large amount of quantity respondents. Unlike the qualitative method, which focuses on a more in-depth aspect to understand individuals, while mixed methods eliminate both contradictions, quantitative is more onto generalized and standardized aspect.

The main purpose of quantitative method is to quantify data which fits the research on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Fiesta, where a large amount of data is needed to generate general assumptions. Under the circumstances of scarce resources and time constraint, quantitative survey method is also the most suitable for studying and proving the research. It is too time-consuming to cover every TCM Fiesta participant; therefore we chose to pick only 50 event participants as our representative sampling (Kruskal, 1979). However, there is a limitation for using sample units as it’s only a representative data instead of the whole population. Thus, the accuracy of the result might not be high (Varalakshmi, 2004).

Conducting survey is convenient, cost-saving and is easy to collect and analyse the data (Wyse, 2012). Survey generates generalized answers by questioning respondents with close-ended questions or multiple-choice answers. In fact, numerous demographic, psychographic and behaviouristic questions were asked in order to understand the respondents’ profiles, background, mind-set, status etc. Including open-ended questions in the survey in order to further study the respondents in-depth thinking is also considered as qualitative research.

3.2 Procedures, Participants

The questionnaire has a total of 21 questions, mostly consisting of close-ended questions with multiple choices answers. Five questions used a 5-point rating based on Likert scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) and one open-ended question is included to further understand the respondents’ thinking. The survey covers brief demographic questions such as gender and faculty since the targeted participants are clear, and the rest is to understand the respondents’ understanding on own health condition and traditional Chinese medicine. The questions also asked the effectiveness of the campaign and benefits obtained by the students. In addition, questions on investigating the media habits and its effects in affecting students participating rate also covered in the survey questionnaire.

The event was held in UTAR, thus it is assured that most of the event participants were students. Survey questionnaires were distributed among both female and male students in regardless of their courses. Another reason for the event to target students is that the young generation nowadays has very little confidence on traditional Chinese medicine according to the result of an experiment conducted by Cheung Chi Kong, Chu Hok Keung and Ting Wai Tong in 1990. As stated in the experiment, the most important causes of not being confident over traditional Chinese medicine were not scientific enough (87%) and not professional in diagnosis (67%). In fact, several reasons stated by the group of respondents for not using Chinese medicine were the inconvenience of the methods; no confidence in its effectiveness; no immediate effect and troublesome in preparation. Therefore, people are more preferable over consuming western medicine than traditional Chinese medicine in the contemporary society. Since the campaign was organized using Mandarin, hence it can be concluded that only Chinese students or students that are capable in understanding Chinese language will be attending this event.

After distributing the surveys, the data is then gathered and analysed. The analysed data will be interpreted and made into figurative data (pie chart, table form etc.) for simpler presentations.

Research Questions: