Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2024 May;348:116808. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116808. Epub 2024 Mar 24.
Communicating health disparities in mass and social media has typically taken the form of comparing disease risks and outcomes between two or more social groups, a strategy known as social comparison framing. This comprehensive review examined the design and results of 17 studies from 15 peer-reviewed journal articles about the effects of social comparison framing of health disparities. Most studies focus on race-based disparities across a variety of health topics. For individual-level outcomes, social comparison tends to reduce perceived disease risks for the lower disease prevalence group while prompting negative emotions and yielding inconsistent impact on health behavioral intentions among members of the higher prevalence group. For societal-level outcomes, social comparison often has either null or polarizing effects on support for policies to address these disparities that vary by racial identity/attitudes of the respondents. Studies also find that racial comparisons trigger lower levels of support for policy remedies relative to economic, educational, or geographic comparisons. We conclude that social comparison framing of health disparities, in the absence of broader discussion of the social and structural causes of these disparities, is more likely to incur negative consequences. We propose several possible strategies to communicate health disparity information more effectively.
在大众媒体和社交媒体上传播健康差异时，通常采用将两种或多种社会群体的疾病风险和结果进行比较的策略，这种策略被称为社会比较框架。本综述全面考察了来自 15 篇同行评议期刊文章中 17 项研究的设计和结果，这些研究探讨了健康差异的社会比较框架的效果。大多数研究都集中在各种健康主题上的基于种族的差异。对于个体层面的结果，社会比较往往会降低低疾病流行群体对疾病风险的感知，同时在高流行群体成员中引发负面情绪，并对健康行为意向产生不一致的影响。对于社会层面的结果，社会比较通常对解决这些差异的政策的支持要么没有影响，要么具有两极分化的影响，这取决于受访者的种族身份/态度。研究还发现，与经济、教育或地理比较相比，种族比较会引发对政策补救措施的支持度降低。我们得出结论，在没有更广泛地讨论这些差异的社会和结构原因的情况下，对健康差异进行社会比较框架更有可能带来负面后果。我们提出了几种可能的策略，以更有效地传播健康差异信息。
