Framing of health disparities in a professional public health newspaper

Framing and agenda-setting theories suggest that the news media play an important role in influencing public opinion on policy issues. Previous research using content analysis documents an emphasis on biomedical and behavioral determinants of health and health disparities within the news media, with little attention paid to the social determinants of health (SDOH). This narrow view of health in the news may help explain why the health policy discourse in the U.S. has a similarly narrow focus, despite the large evidence base and understanding among public health professionals regarding the importance of the SDOH. The purpose of this study is to explore how a major trade publication, intended as a news source for public health professionals and a resource for the broader media, presents health disparities. This presentation will describe how health disparities are framed in terms of causes, solutions and attribution of responsibility. Stories were selected among all available newspaper issues based upon a comprehensive key word search and explicit inclusion criteria. A variety of quantitative measures, typical of media content analysis (e.g. story prominence and placement) are included, as well as variables intended to describe the coverage of health disparities. Findings will be presented in terms of the distribution of health conditions, types of disparities, causes, solutions, and responsible agents identified by news story. The presentation will include a discussion of the application of news content analysis to a trade publication, highlighting important analytical considerations and implications for agenda-setting.