A Reflexive Inquiry of Two Non-Smokers: A Trans-Generational Tale of Social Gospel and Social Norms Marketing

Over the course of one academic year, two researchers combined research methods of reflexive inquiry and memory-work to understand the situated learning during their teen years in terms of its influence on their not taking up cigarette smoking. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the influence of the social gospel were central to the Ontario farm community in which Dorothy grew up in the 1960s. Angie grew up in small town Nova Scotia during the 1990s, exposed to parental smoking and the social marketing of the health hazards of smoking. The researchers draw on the critical incident questionnaire (Brookfield, 1995) as a way to remember 'nodal moments' in their smoking/non-smoking autobiographies. Their autobiographies serve as embodied reflexive texts and triggers to engage in dialogue on the deeper social meaning of not taking up smoking as teenagers. They conclude that traces of the social gospel remain as an influence in Angie's teen years, and that Dorothy was exposed to anti-smoking social marketing in the 1960s even before it had this name.