Introduction

Public health campaigns combining both visual and narrative discourses are very common in the field. In 2008, the author became interested in a prevention campaign created by Quebec's Ministry of Health and Social Services for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in young adults. The author concludes with thoughts on Situational Analysis (SA) as a method for analyzing visual and narrative discourses such as those produced by public health agencies. SA was attractive for this project because it was not only compatible with our epistemological positions as researchers, but also because it offered practical tools to flesh out our data. In retrospect, we can see how experimenting with SA allowed us to work more closely with all the discourses rather than immediately focus on a dominant discourse. The practical dimensions of SA were particularly helpful in working with mute evidence such as the posters and web messages.