A Decade of Research on Health Content in the Media: The Focus on Health Challenges and Sociocultural Context and Attendant Informational and Ideological Problems

There is a burgeoning interest in the health and illness content of popular media in the domains of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. This article reviews the past 10 years of this research, describing the relationship between the health topics addressed in the research, the shifting focus of concerns about the media, and, ultimately, the variation in problems for health promotion. I suggest that research attending to topics related to bodily health challenges focused on whether popular media accurately or appropriately represented health challenges. The implication was that there is some consensus about more right or wrong, complete or incomplete ways of representing an issue; the problem was that the media are generally wrong. Alternatively, research addressing topics related to sociocultural context issues focused on how certain interests are privileged in the media. The implication was that competing groups are making claims on the system, but the problem was that popular media marginalizes certain interests. In short, popular media is not likely to facilitate understandings helpful to individuals coping with health challenges and is likely to perpetuate social and political power differentials with regard to health-related issues. I conclude by offering some possibilities for future health media content research.

Notes

¹Kline's (2003) review revealed that the problems identified by content-analytic research vary given guiding theoretical assumptions and related methodologies; notably, the research I review here employed comparable theory and methods and drew similar conclusions.

²Surprisingly, only one study addressed representations of health care relationships (Simi, 1997).

³I could not bring myself to categorize pornography as entertainment, though it is likely this is the most relevant domain; I categorized it as “other” (likewise with popular books on self-help).

⁴Sociocultural groups also were acknowledged by addressing health concerns biophysically associated with one group. Homosexuality was referenced in the context of talking about the “gay gene” (Conrad & Markens, 2001), the “reparative therapy” controversy (Stewart, 2005), or HIV/AIDS (Lupton, 1999; see also Gwyn, 1999). Exceptionally, Yadlon's (1997) analysis of breast cancer representations included an insightful discussion of how mainstream media represents a heteronormative discourse (e.g., lesbianism replaces parity as a risk factor), but this is not apparent from the title or abstract of the article. Except for studies about the way that HIV/AIDS depictions “produce and reiterate notions of normative and deviant sexuality” for women (Sacks, 1996; see also Mensah, 2000), gender, in particular, was invoked by talking about health concerns like breast cancer for women and prostate or testicular cancer for men. Additionally, gender studies were concerned with women's health issues such as sexual and reproductive health in general (e.g., Johnson et al., 1999) as well as menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, and menopause specifically (e.g., Carlson et al., 1997; Gannon & Stevens, 1998). Considering each of these health concerns in terms of the broader categories of sexual and reproductive health related to puberty, fertility, and physiological changes related to aging it becomes apparent that there is a subtle gendering of these as health issues since there is a dearth of research on representations of analogous states in men. In fact, there were few studies concerned with men's health, especially when compared with the proliferate scholarship on women's health.

⁵Changes and processes related to reproductive health could have been included here, but it appears that their gendered nature trumps their status as chronic conditions; thus, they are discussed in the section on health politics.

⁶The entertainment media research I include here referred to media that was commensurate with or was treated like traditional news, invoking, if not journalistic standards, an alignment with the critiques of news media. For example, West's (2005) study of the intense public debate about the movie John Q. analyzed news media and discussed the controversy over whether the movie met the standards of good journalism and good political debate. The “fair and balanced” criteria also was used in Turow and Gan's (2002) analysis of the health policy issues depicted in prime-time medical dramas.