Patterson Chris, Hilton Shona
MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, UK.
Open Obes J. 2013;5:82-91. doi: 10.2174/1876823720131001011. Epub 2013 Nov 13.
Obesity represents a major and growing global public health concern. The mass media play an important role in shaping public understandings of health, and obesity attracts much media coverage. This study offers the first content analysis of photographs illustrating UK newspaper articles about obesity. The researchers studied 119 articles and images from five major national newspapers. Researchers coded the manifest content of each image and article and used a graphical scale to estimate the body size of each image subject. Data were analysed with regard to the concepts of the normalisation and stigmatisation of obesity. Articles' descriptions of subjects' body sizes were often found to differ from coders' estimates, and subjects described as obese tended to represent the higher values of the obese BMI range, differing from the distribution of BMI values of obese adults in the UK. Researchers identified a tendency for image subjects described as overweight or obese to be depicted in stereotypical ways that could reinforce stigma. These findings are interpreted as illustrations of how newspaper portrayals of obesity may contribute to societal normalisation and the stigmatisation of obesity, two forces that threaten to harm obese individuals and undermine public health efforts to reverse trends in obesity.
肥胖是一个日益严重的全球重大公共卫生问题。大众媒体在塑造公众对健康的认知方面发挥着重要作用，肥胖问题也备受媒体关注。本研究首次对英国报纸上关于肥胖的文章所配照片进行了内容分析。研究人员研究了五家全国性大报的119篇文章及图片。研究人员对每张图片和每篇文章的显性内容进行编码，并使用图表尺度来估计每个图片主体的体型。研究数据围绕肥胖的正常化和污名化概念进行了分析。研究发现，文章对主体体型的描述往往与编码人员的估计不同，被描述为肥胖的主体往往代表肥胖BMI范围的较高值，这与英国肥胖成年人的BMI值分布不同。研究人员发现，被描述为超重或肥胖的图片主体有以刻板方式呈现的倾向，这可能会强化污名化。这些发现被解释为报纸对肥胖的描绘如何可能导致肥胖在社会上的正常化和污名化的例证，这两种力量有可能伤害肥胖个体，并破坏旨在扭转肥胖趋势的公共卫生努力。
