Semantic Network Model of Cold and Flu Medications

ABSTRACT



The cold and the flu are two of the most prevalent diseases in the world. Many over the counter (OTC) medications have been created to combat the symptoms of these illnesses. Some medications take a holistic approach by claiming to alleviate a wide range of symptoms, while others target a specific symptom. As these medications become more ubiquitous within the United State of America (USA), consumers form associations and mental models about the cold/flu field. The goal of Study 1 was to build a Pathfinder network based on the associations consumers make between cold/flu symptoms and medications. 100 participants, 18 years or older, fluent in English, and residing in the USA, completed a survey about the relatedness of cold/flu symptoms to OTC medications. They rated the relatedness on a scale of 1 (highly unrelated) to 7 (highly related) and those rankings were used to build a Pathfinder network that represented the average of those associations. Study 2 was conducted to validate the Pathfinder network. A different set of 90 participants with the same restrictions as those in Study 1 completed a matching associations test. They were prompted to match symptoms and medications they associated closely with each other. Results showered a significant negative correlation between the geodetic distance (the number of links between objects in the Pathfinder network) separating symptoms and medications and frequency of pairing symptoms with medication. This provides evidence of the validity of the Pathfinder network. It was also seen that, higher the relatedness rating between symptoms and medications in Study 1, higher the frequency of pairing symptom to medication in Study 2, and the more directly linked those symptoms and medications were in the Pathfinder network. This network can inform pharmaceutical companies about which symptoms they most closely associate with, who their competitors are, what symptoms they can dominate, and how to market their medications more effectively.