Culture and Health Reporting: A Comparative Content Analysis of Newspapers in the United States and China

Abstract

Health reporting has the potential to educate the public and promote health behaviors. Culture influences the style of such communication. Following the theorization of national cultures by Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) and Wilber (2000), this study compares health reporting in the United States and China through a content analysis of leading newspapers. The authors discover significant differences in health reporting in terms of controllability attribution, temporal orientation, citation of authority sources, and use of statistics. As one of the first comparative content analysis studies of health reporting in Eastern and Western cultures, this study provides a unique cultural lens for health communication scholars to better understand health information in the news media.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Jie Zhuang and Jacob Bonander for their assistance in coding.

Notes

¹We used the top newspapers in the largest cities to represent the leading newspapers of the two countries. We did not use circulation as the criteria for choosing the most prominent newspapers, because circulation numbers of Chinese newspapers were often inflated and thus did not reflect the influence of the newspapers accurately (Zhao, 2008).

²We used percentage agreement instead of Cohen's kappa for calculating intercoder reliability for the coding of health topics. Cohen's kappa cannot be used when both coders assign the same value to a coding item consistently (Wang & Gantz, 2007). In coding health topics, coders assigned yes or no to each health topic. There was a high probability that, in coding the 20% of the articles used in calculating intercoder reliability, both coders coded no to each article on several health topics. In this case, Cohen's kappa would be 0, which does not reflect the agreements between coders. As a result, percentage agreement was calculated to measure intercoder reliability.