Is There Health Out There in the Afrosphere? An Analysis of Health-Related Content Posted by Black Bloggers

Abstract

We explored the extent to which Blacks use online blogs to communicate health information. We content analyzed blogs' main pages for: health-related text, badges, subject lists, and tag clouds. Half of the blogs possessed one of the aforementioned items referencing or depicting health. Violence/crime and health/healthcare were referenced most frequently. We also analyzed health-related posts by coding for presumed posting purpose. We found that bloggers most often posted health content in order to share information; very few promoted healthier behavior. We assert that blogs have the potential to be an important health communication tool for reaching Black Americans.

KEYWORDS:

• new media
• social media
• African Americans
• blogging
• content analysis
• health communication

Acknowledgments

This publication was made possible through a cooperative agreement between the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); its contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of ORISE or CDC.

Notes

^a Of the content coded as “War/crime/violence,” only n = 12 were coded as war-related (14%) of the category.

Note. One blog was written by a sight-impaired individual.

Trackbacks are generally used if a blogger wants to link to an existing post from another blog. Then they may use the existing post's trackback URL to link the new post with the existing one. The author of the existing post will receive notification that another blogger has created a link between the two posts. Most blog hosting sites support trackbacks; however, a few do not.

We defined a post as the equivalent of one blog entry made by the individual(s) maintaining the website, which generally consists of a headline, followed by commentaries, events descriptions, or audiovisual content.

We defined a “comment page” as at least one webpage linked to an original blog post on which readers' and visitors' commentary was displayed. A comment page did not exist if visitors/readers had not used the “comment function” to reply to a post.

We defined a trackback as a web link from one blog to another.

A widget is a small web-based application that can be embedded on a webpage. The code for the widget is managed by a third-party, so that a blogger cannot change the content of the widget only whether or not to embed the widget. Widgets are usually more dynamic (e.g., page view counters) than badges but can also communicate endorsement for a product, brand, organization, or idea.