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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Charlene Caburnay, MPH, Douglas Luke, PhD, and Matthew W. Kreuter, PhD, MPH. Health Communication Research Laboratory, Saint Louis University, 3545 Lafayette Ave., Saint Louis, MO 63104, 314-977-4028, caburnay@slu.edu
The media’s coverage of disease prevention and health promotion issues is less than optimal by public health standards. Understanding the degree to which journalists have been “enterprising” with their health stories and raising journalists’ awareness of this effort could serve as a first step to increasing the quality of the health stories they publish. In this study we developed a measure of journalistic enterprise for health stories published in local newspapers and assessed its psychometric properties. A total of 1,373 health stories from 1999-2000 in four mid-size Missouri community daily newspapers were analyzed to determine the factor structure of journalistic enterprise, the best latent class solution for the model, and the reliability of each of the three subscales. The factor analysis suggested a three-factor solution to journalistic enterprise. The latent class analysis similarly suggested a three-class solution which differentiated well between at least two of the 3 classes for most of the items. After deleting ill-fitting variables, each of the three factors had a moderate to high degree of internal consistency. If this measure of journalistic enterprise can rapidly provide feedback to journalists on their degree of enterprise taken in producing a specific health story, it may bring about increased levels of enterprise when producing future health stories.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Media,
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.