Nursing Assignment Guide
A practical breakdown for nursing students working on the “Lights, Camera, Accuracy: Nurses in the Media” activity. Covers how to pick the right advertisement, what each of the 7 questions is really asking, and how to format your submission correctly.
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The Deconstructing Media Messages activity asks you to locate one advertisement that portrays nursing — in print, online, or on TV — and then systematically analyse it using 7 specific questions about message ownership, audience, text, subtext, persuasion tools, positive and negative nursing portrayals, and what is left out of the frame. It is a media literacy exercise grounded in professional identity and the nursing image.
This assignment sits in a broader academic conversation about how nursing is portrayed — and often misrepresented — in popular media. The readings your course provides (Stanley, 2008; Glerean et al., 2019; Anthony et al., 2019) all point to the same problem: the public image of nursing is largely constructed by people who are not nurses, and that image shapes everything from how patients interact with nurses to how policymakers fund nursing education.
That is the point of this exercise. You are not just describing an ad. You are learning to read media critically — a skill that matters in clinical practice too. When a pharmaceutical company runs a nurse-facing campaign, when a hospital system advertises for staff, when a TV drama shows a nurse character in a particular light, someone made deliberate choices about what to show and what to leave out. This assignment teaches you to ask why.
The seven questions are not arbitrary. They follow the classic media literacy analysis framework, which breaks a media message into its production context (who made it and for what purpose), its surface-level content (what is literally there), its deeper encoded meaning (what it implies or assumes), its rhetorical mechanics (how it persuades), and its ideological gaps (what it omits or distorts). Walk through that framework carefully and your analysis will hold together.
What “Deconstruct” Actually Means Here
Deconstruction in this context does not mean critique for its own sake. It means taking apart the components of a media message to understand how they work together to produce meaning. A recruitment ad for a nursing school is not just a friendly invitation — it is a carefully constructed message with a target audience, a budget, a desired emotional response, and an implicit set of assumptions about what nursing is and who does it. Pulling that apart, piece by piece, is what this assignment is asking for.
How to Find the Right Advertisement
The advertisement you pick will determine how easy — or how painful — this assignment is to write. Choose something with enough content to actually analyse across all 7 questions. A simple banner ad with one stock photo and three words will not give you much to work with. A 30-second TV commercial or a full-page print ad has far more material.
Here are the types of advertisements that tend to work well for this assignment:
Hospital System Recruitment Ads
Major health systems like Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and Mayo Clinic run nurses-wanted campaigns with specific messaging about profession, values, and identity. Rich with subtext and persuasion tools.
Pharmaceutical or Medical Device Ads
Nurse-facing ads in journals like the American Journal of Nursing. Often have a clear commercial sponsor, specific target audience, and implicit assumptions about who nurses are.
Nursing School Recruitment Ads
BSN, MSN, and DNP program advertisements (print, web, or TV) target specific demographics and often make claims about nursing identity and career trajectory that are worth examining.
TV/Streaming Commercials
Hospital chain ads, travel nursing agency spots, or healthcare staffing commercials aired on major networks. Video format gives you audio, visuals, and music to analyse under Question 3.
Professional Organisation Campaigns
ANA (American Nurses Association) public campaigns, “Nurses Week” advertisements, or advocacy campaigns. These have clear institutional sponsors and explicit messaging about nursing’s social value.
Social Media Campaigns
Sponsored posts from healthcare brands or staffing agencies on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. Include a screenshot or link. These often reveal a lot about target audience through their platform and visual choices.
Where to Actually Find Advertisements
- YouTube — search for hospital or nursing school TV commercials; many are archived
- AdAge.com and Adweek.com — professional ad industry archives with healthcare campaigns
- Google Images — search “nursing recruitment advertisement” or “travel nursing ad”
- Your own email or social media feeds — sponsored content counts if it clearly portrays nursing
- The ANA website (nursingworld.org) — public campaigns and advocacy materials
- Print journal archives — CINAHL or your library database often has scanned nursing journal issues with original advertisements
Once you have chosen your ad, provide either a direct link (for web or video ads) or include the image/screenshot in your paper. The assignment brief says to include a copy or link — do not skip this. Your instructor needs to see what you are analysing.
Breaking Down All 7 Analysis Questions
Each question targets a different layer of the media message. They build on each other — you need to answer Question 3 (the text) before you can meaningfully answer Question 4 (the subtext). Work through them in order when drafting, even if your final paper reorganises or integrates them.
Whose message is this? Who created or paid for it? Why?
Start by identifying the sponsor — the organisation or individual that produced or funded the advertisement. This is not always obvious, especially in institutional campaigns where the visual branding is subtle. Look for logos, website URLs, fine print, or channel attribution.
Then address the “why.” What does the sponsor gain from this message? A hospital system running a nurse recruitment ad gains staff. A nursing school running a BSN program ad gains tuition-paying students. A pharmaceutical company running a nurse-facing clinical education ad gains prescribing influence or brand recognition. The motivation behind a media message shapes every other element of it.
Who is the “target audience”? What is their age, ethnicity, class, profession, interests, etc.?
This question asks you to infer the intended viewer from the choices made in the ad — not just say “nurses.” Get specific. Are they targeting new nursing graduates or experienced RNs? A particular demographic? People in a specific region or specialty? Look at the visual choices, the language register, the platform where the ad appears, and the assumptions the ad makes about the viewer’s current situation.
Words, images, and sounds all carry demographic signals. An ad showing a diverse group of young nurses in a modern urban hospital setting targets a different audience than one showing a solo experienced nurse in a rural or community setting. The music choice in a TV commercial, the ethnicity and gender of models used, the educational credentials mentioned — all of these are audience signals.
What is the “text” of the message? What do we actually see and/or hear?
This question is asking for a descriptive inventory of the ad’s literal content. The brief specifies exactly what counts: written or spoken words, photos, drawings, logos, design, music, sounds. Go through each of these categories for your chosen ad.
If it is a print ad: describe what is in the image, what words appear on the page, what fonts and colours are used, what logo or branding is present, how the layout is structured. If it is a video: describe what happens visually, what is said or narrated, what background music or sound effects are used, what text appears on screen.
Be thorough here. This section is the foundation of your analysis. You cannot identify subtext (Q4) or persuasion tools (Q5) unless you have clearly established what is actually in the ad.
What is the “subtext” of the message? What is the hidden or unstated meaning?
This is where the analysis deepens. Subtext is the meaning that an ad communicates without stating it directly — the assumptions it makes, the values it encodes, the ideological frame it operates within. It is what the ad implies about nursing, about nurses, about patients, and about healthcare.
For example: an ad showing a smiling nurse alongside a grateful patient implies that nursing’s primary value is emotional caregiving and patient satisfaction rather than clinical expertise. An ad that shows only female nurses encodes a gender assumption. An ad that prominently features high-tech equipment implies that the setting and tools are as important as the nursing relationship. None of these things may be stated explicitly — but they are communicated.
The readings your course assigned are directly useful here. Stanley’s (2008) analysis of nurses in feature films identifies recurring subtextual patterns — the nurse as handmaiden, the nurse as sex object, the nurse as invisible — that appear in advertising as well as entertainment media.
What “tools of persuasion” are used?
Persuasion tools are the rhetorical and psychological techniques an ad uses to influence the viewer’s feelings, beliefs, or behaviour. In media literacy education, these are sometimes called persuasive techniques or rhetorical devices. Common ones to look for in nursing-related advertisements include:
- Emotional appeal (pathos) — images of patient gratitude, family reunion scenes, soft lighting, uplifting music
- Authority appeal (ethos) — hospital credentials, statistics, professional endorsements, institutional logos
- Logical appeal (logos) — salary figures, career advancement claims, programme accreditation details
- Bandwagon — “join thousands of nurses who have chosen…”
- Aspirational imagery — showing an idealised version of nursing life that emphasises reward and downplays difficulty
- Fear appeal — less common in nursing ads but appears in some safety or staffing shortage campaigns
Identify which specific tools appear in your chosen ad and explain how each one functions in the context of the message. Do not just list them — show how they work.
What positive messages are presented? What negative messages are presented?
This is the most directly profession-focused question, and it is the one most connected to why nursing students are doing this exercise at all. Identify what the ad communicates — directly or through subtext — about nursing as a profession, and evaluate whether those messages are accurate, affirming, or damaging.
Positive messages might include: nursing as skilled and clinically complex work; nurses as autonomous professionals; the emotional and relational dimensions of nursing as a strength rather than a subordinate characteristic; nurses as leaders and advocates; diversity within the nursing workforce.
Negative messages might include: nursing as purely task-oriented or assistant-level work; nurses as homogeneous in gender, race, or age; nursing as secondary to physician leadership; the reduction of nursing to physical appearance or emotional nurturing; the erasure of advanced practice nursing or the complexity of the role.
Use your course readings here — Glerean et al. (2019) on nursing profession perceptions and Anthony et al. (2019) on nursing image in career novels give you scholarly language for discussing both constructive and distorted nursing portrayals in media.
What part of the story is not being told?
This question asks about omission — what is absent from the ad, and why that absence is meaningful. Every media message is selective. Every frame includes some things and excludes others. The question is what those exclusions reveal about the message’s ideological assumptions and the sponsor’s interests.
Think about what your chosen ad does not show: Does it show nursing during a routine or difficult shift, or only the highlight moments? Does it show the emotional labour and burnout that are well-documented in the profession, or only the reward? Does it show the advocacy and clinical decision-making dimensions of nursing, or only the bedside care and emotional connection? Does it represent the full demographic diversity of the nursing workforce, or a narrow slice?
This is also where you can address the structural realities of nursing that advertising rarely acknowledges: staffing ratios, workplace violence, the gender pay gap in healthcare leadership, the racial disparities in nursing representation and advancement. If a hospital recruitment ad promises a fulfilling, supportive career without mentioning any of these realities, that gap is part of the story that is not being told.
Connecting Your Analysis to Media Literacy Theory
This assignment is not just a personal reaction paper. It sits within an established field — media literacy — and connects to a specific body of nursing research on professional image and public perception. Weaving that context into your response makes the difference between a surface-level description and an academically credible analysis.
The image of nursing conveyed by the media is rarely constructed by nurses themselves. It reflects the assumptions, interests, and aesthetics of media producers — and those assumptions shape public understanding of what nursing is and who nurses are at least as powerfully as professional bodies or nursing education ever could.
— Adapted from Stanley, D.J. (2008). Celluloid Angels: A Research Study of Nurses in Feature Films 1900–2007. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 64(1), 84–95.Stanley’s (2008) study, which your course assigns as a reading, is directly applicable to this assignment. It documents the patterns through which nurses have been portrayed in feature films across more than a century — a pattern of invisibility, domestication, sexualisation, and professional subordination that persists in advertising media as well. When you identify subtext in Question 4, Stanley gives you the scholarly language to name it.
Glerean et al.’s (2019) focus group study with applicants to nursing education is equally useful. It identifies a persistent disconnect between the public image of nursing — shaped largely by media — and the clinical reality of the profession as experienced by nurses themselves. That gap is exactly what this assignment is designed to surface. Use the study to frame your discussion of positive and negative messages in Question 6.
Anthony et al.’s (2019) examination of nursing image in career novels extends this conversation to print media, showing that the same distortions found in film and television appear in written media as well. If your chosen advertisement shows similar patterns — the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, and clinically invisible — these three sources together give you a solid evidentiary foundation for saying so.
One Additional Verified External Source
Beyond the course readings, the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) “Campaign for Nursing’s Future” materials and the ANA’s official position statements on nursing’s professional image provide peer-reviewed and institutionally authoritative sources on how nursing wants to be portrayed versus how it often is. The ANA’s Code of Ethics for Nurses (2015) includes provisions related to professional advocacy that connect directly to why nurses should care about media representation. These are available at nursingworld.org and are appropriate scholarly/professional references for this assignment.
Choosing Your Submission Format
The assignment gives you six submission options. They all require you to address the same 7 questions — the format changes the packaging, not the intellectual task. Choose the format you can execute most efficiently and most effectively given your available time.
Paper
APA format. Include title and reference pages. Most straightforward option — just answer the 7 questions in organised paragraphs.
PowerPoint
Add title and reference slides. Follow Rules of 7 (max 7 lines per slide, 7 words per line). Include speaker notes for full analysis.
Video Presentation
Professional background. Script submitted via Turnitin with Originality Report. Attach reference page. Most time-intensive option.
Table
Appropriate columns and headers. Include title and reference pages. Works well for this assignment — one row per question, with analysis in adjacent column.
Graphs / Illustrations
Labelled appropriately. Include title and reference pages. Less common choice for a textual analysis task.
Poster
Use any applicable poster template. Include graphics and images. Appropriate title and references on the poster itself.
For most students, the paper or table format is the most efficient for this assignment. The 7-question structure maps cleanly onto either format. If you choose paper, use the 7 questions as your organising structure — address each one in order, with clear signposting. If you choose table, set up three columns: Question | Your Analysis | Scholarly Support.
Video Submission — One Extra Requirement
If you choose the video option, the assignment requires a separate Word document script submitted through Turnitin with an Originality Report. This is in addition to the video itself. Budget time for both the recording and the script submission. The script should cover the same content you present verbally in the video — it is not optional.
APA Formatting Requirements for Paper Submissions
The paper option requires APA compliance. For this type of assignment, that means a title page with your name, course number, instructor name, and date in APA 7th edition format; 2 to 3 pages of double-spaced analysis (12pt Times New Roman, 1-inch margins); and a reference page listing your two or more scholarly sources in correct APA 7th format. Your course readings — Stanley (2008), Glerean et al. (2019), Anthony et al. (2019) — can serve as two of your required scholarly references if you cite them in your analysis. For a third, the ANA (2015) Code of Ethics or the nursingworld.org campaign materials work well.
Finding Scholarly Sources for This Assignment
The assignment requires a minimum of two scholarly sources. Your course already provides three: Stanley (2008), Glerean et al. (2019), and Anthony et al. (2019). Use at least two of these and you are already meeting the requirement. But if you want to go further — or if your analysis of a specific ad type benefits from additional context — here is where to look.
| Source Type | Where to Find It | Relevant For |
|---|---|---|
| Course-assigned readings | Your course LMS — directly linked in the activity page | Foundational evidence for all 7 questions; already in your reference list |
| ANA publications and position statements | nursingworld.org — free access to many professional documents | Professional nursing identity, advocacy, and the nursing image; institutional authority |
| CINAHL database | Your university library portal — search “nursing media portrayal” or “nursing image advertisement” | Peer-reviewed nursing research on media representation; supports Q4, Q6, Q7 |
| Media literacy academic journals | Journal of Media Literacy Education; Journal of Health Communication — via library databases | Theoretical frameworks for Q3–Q5; definition of persuasion tools and media analysis methods |
| Nursing professional journals | American Journal of Nursing; Nursing Outlook — search for articles on nursing professional image | Professional context for Q6 and Q7; what nursing actually looks like vs. how it is portrayed |
Citing the Advertisement Itself
Your chosen advertisement is also a source that needs to appear in your reference list. In APA 7th edition, cite it as you would any media source — with the sponsor/creator as author, the year of publication or broadcast where known, the title or description of the ad, and a URL or retrieval information. If you cannot determine the exact year, use (n.d.) and provide the URL where you found it. Your instructor needs to be able to locate the ad you analysed.
Common Mistakes in This Assignment
Most students who lose marks on this assignment do so for one of a small number of predictable reasons. Here are the ones that come up most often:
| ❌ The Mistake | Why It Costs You | ✓ The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Confusing text and subtext (Q3 and Q4) | Text is what is literally there. Subtext is what it implies. Mixing these up shows you have not engaged with the key media literacy distinction the assignment is teaching. | In Q3, only describe what you see and hear. Reserve all interpretation for Q4. If you catch yourself saying “this suggests” or “this implies,” you are writing Q4 content — move it. |
| Choosing an ad with too little content | A minimal ad gives you almost nothing to work with across 7 questions. Your paper ends up thin, repetitive, or padded. | Pick an ad that has multiple distinct elements: visuals, text, audio (if video), design choices, and clear sponsor context. More raw material means more to analyse. |
| Answering Q7 as a summary of Q6 | Q7 is specifically about omission and what is absent from the ad — not a restatement of the negative messages already identified in Q6. | In Q7, think beyond what the ad got wrong to what it simply left out. What realities of nursing does this ad not show at all — and why might that be? |
| Listing persuasion tools without explaining how they work | Saying “the ad uses emotional appeal” gives no analytical value. Q5 requires you to show how the tool functions in this specific ad. | For each persuasion tool you identify, explain: what specific element uses it (the image of the grateful patient, the upbeat music, the statistic in the headline) and what effect it is designed to produce in the viewer. |
| No scholarly sources in the analysis | Two scholarly sources must be cited in the body of your work, not just listed on the reference page. A reference list with uncited sources tells your instructor you did not integrate them. | Cite Stanley (2008) when discussing stereotypical patterns. Cite Glerean et al. (2019) when discussing public perceptions. Cite Anthony et al. (2019) when discussing fictional nursing portrayals. These readings exist to be used. |
| Personal opinion without analytical support | This is a media analysis, not a reaction paper. “I think this ad is bad because nurses are shown as subordinate” needs the scholarly evidence that says why that portrayal is problematic. | Every critical claim you make should connect back to the evidence: what does the research say about how this kind of portrayal affects public perceptions of nursing, recruitment, or professional identity? |
Pre-Submission Checklist
- Advertisement is included as a copy, screenshot, or direct link
- All 7 questions are addressed — none skipped or merged
- Q3 (text) is purely descriptive; interpretation saved for Q4 and Q5
- Q7 discusses what is absent, not a repeat of Q6
- At least two scholarly sources are cited within the body of the analysis
- Title page and reference page included (paper/table/presentation formats)
- APA 7th edition formatting throughout
- Word choice is professional — no casual language or personal reaction tone
Frequently Asked Questions
The Bigger Picture Behind This Assignment
This assignment is small — one ad, seven questions, two to three pages. But what it is teaching is not small. Media shapes public understanding of nursing. And that matters clinically, politically, and professionally in ways that follow nurses throughout their careers.
When patients watch nurses on TV for years and arrive at the bedside expecting a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of job, the gap between that expectation and reality has real consequences for the therapeutic relationship. When policymakers who fund nursing education and staffing have their understanding of the profession shaped by advertising imagery rather than clinical reality, real staffing decisions follow. The skills you build here — reading a message critically, identifying who made it and why, recognising what it leaves out — are directly transferable to clinical practice and professional advocacy.
That is why your course puts this activity in front of you. Do it carefully.
For expert support with this assignment and others in your nursing program, the specialist writers and nursing academics at Smart Academic Writing are available to help you at every stage — from nursing assignment guidance and reflective papers to presentation writing and BSN-level support.