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Abstract
Breast cancer is one of the most feared diseases in contemporary Western society. Popular women's magazines are important sources of information about and orientation to the disease. The current study applies problematic integration theory in an interpretive analysis of all breast cancer articles appearing in five top-circulating women's magazines between 1997 and 2002. In so doing, the study illuminates two major challenges (uncertainty and ambivalence) and several imperfect approaches to coping constructed in this discourse (simplification, information-seeking/provision, affect management, trusting intuition, sustaining hope, and metaphoric reframing). These results have several clear and important practical implications and highlight a major and largely untried direction for future research.
This paper is based on the first author's M.A. thesis, which was completed under the direction of the second author. An earlier draft was presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, November 2004
This paper is based on the first author's M.A. thesis, which was completed under the direction of the second author. An earlier draft was presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, November 2004
Notes
This paper is based on the first author's M.A. thesis, which was completed under the direction of the second author. An earlier draft was presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, November 2004
1. See Babrow (Citation1995) for a research exemplar based on a literary text and Babrow and Dutta-Bergman (Citation2003) for an exemplar based on newspaper coverage of bioterrorism.