A Pentadic Analysis of a Norwegian Health Communication Outreach Program

This thesis uses Burke Dramatism to analyze a Norwegian Health Communication Outreach Program. The program was developed to reduce the number of no-shows at the hospitals on the West Coast of Norway. No-shows is used for the act of people not showing up. Burke’s dramatism was chosen as the method of analysis because it allows me to see the program creator’s hidden motives, and the terministic screens that are not represented in the development of the program. I believe that the more terministic screens the hospitals consider when analyzing patients’ behaviors, the more ways they can identify with patients and influence them to come to their appointments. The results show that Burke’s dramatism can be used in analyzing health outreach programs. The analysis discovered that Health West might have focused more on the act-purpose and act-agent ratio, when they should have also added the scene-act and the agent-act ratio