A content analysis of tobacco content in season 1 of ‘And Just Like That’

Barker, Alexander B.; Bal, Jaspreet; Murray, Rachael L.

Abstract

Aim
‘Sex and the City’ regularly featured smoking as a plot device, often linked with sexuality and female empowerment. Eighteen years later, the follow up ‘And Just Like That’ was released. The aim of this paper was to explore the amount of tobacco content in the first series of ‘And Just Like That’.

Subject and methods
A 1-minute content analysis of the 10 episodes from season 1 of ‘And Just Like That’.

Results
The 10 episodes included 394 one-minute intervals of content, with individual episodes ranging from 35–44 minutes. Tobacco content occurred in 45 intervals (11% of the total) across all 10 episodes.

Conclusion
This study demonstrates that, despite the 18-year age gap between the end of the ‘Sex and the City’ TV series and the start of ‘And Just Like That’, and the declining smoking rates during that time, tobacco content is still regularly featured in these programmes. Whilst viewing figures are not available for this series, we know that this was HBO Max’s most streamed show of all time and was highly popular; it is, therefore, likely that large numbers of people were exposed to tobacco content through this programme.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 31, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jun 15, 2023
• Publication Date: Jun 15, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 7, 2023
• Journal: Journal of Public Health
• Print ISSN: 0943-1853
• Electronic ISSN: 1613-2238
• Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-023-01975-5
• Keywords: Tobacco · Smoking · Media · Public Health
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/22725671
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10389-023-01975-5