Department of Food Business and Development, University College, Cork, Ireland.
Health Commun. 2012;27(4):389-98. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2011.592627. Epub 2011 Oct 6.
Both global obesity prevalence rates and media attention to obesity have increased significantly in recent years. The current study examined the representation of obesity in The Irish Times, from 1997 to 2009. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 479 articles to examine how the causes, consequences, and solutions to obesity have been portrayed and how obesity has been described. A frame analysis was also conducted to examine the dominant frames over time. It was found that attention to obesity was positively correlated with time, indicating coverage has increased significantly over the period examined. Regarding reported causes and solutions, the behavioral frame has been dominant, though environmental and mixed-frame stories have become more frequent. The presence of the genetic frame was consistently low. The study provides an overview of how the issue is being represented in Ireland's paper of record and informs health communicators of the dominant and trending messages and the implications for individuals' formation of illness representations.
近年来，全球肥胖症患病率和媒体对肥胖症的关注都显著增加。本研究调查了《爱尔兰时报》（The Irish Times）在 1997 年至 2009 年期间对肥胖症的报道。对 479 篇文章进行了定量内容分析，以研究肥胖症的成因、后果和解决方案是如何被描述的，以及肥胖症是如何被描述的。还进行了框架分析，以研究随时间推移的主导框架。结果发现，对肥胖症的关注与时间呈正相关，这表明在研究期间，报道量显著增加。关于报道的原因和解决方案，行为框架一直占主导地位，尽管环境和混合框架的报道变得更加频繁。遗传框架的存在一直很低。该研究概述了这一问题在爱尔兰主要报纸上的呈现方式，并为健康传播者提供了主导和流行的信息，以及这些信息对个人形成疾病观念的影响。
