Sun Exposure, Tanning Beds, and Herbs That Cure: An Examination of Skin Cancer on Pinterest

ABSTRACT

Skin cancer is the most common cancer affecting the U.S. population. Pinterest.com, a virtual bookmarking social media site, has the potential to disseminate skin cancer-related information among young women, the group with the fastest increase in skin cancer diagnosis. This article presents a quantitative content analysis of pins about skin cancer on Pinterest guided by agenda-setting theory and the health belief model. Overall, sun exposure and tanning beds were most frequently discussed as the causes of skin cancer, and alternative therapies such as herbal medicine were discussed more than traditional biomedical treatment or prevention. Highly repinned pins tend to include more information than regular pins. Different types of skin cancer (melanoma, squamous-cell carcinoma, and basal-cell carcinoma) received the same amount of coverage; however, pins about nonmelanoma skin cancer (such as squamous-cell carcinoma and basal-cell carcinoma) were often information-poor. They were less likely to include information on the causes, prevention, and the biomedical treatment of skin cancer and were less likely to include health belief constructs associated with the promotion of skin cancer prevention and treatment.

Notes

¹ We chose to use percentage agreement instead of intercoder reliability measurements traditionally considered to be more rigorous such as Cohen’s kappa or Krippendorff’s alpha for two reasons. First, percentage agreement is considered especially appropriate in coding categorical variables (present/absent) (Neuendorf, 2002). Second, percentage agreement is more appropriate than kappa or alpha when the distribution of the measure is highly skewed, because latter measurements tend to make the intercorder reliability artificially low even when coding is reasonably reliable (Potter & Levine-Donnerstein, 1999). The distribution of measures is skewed in this study as a large majority of the items were coded as absent in a large majority of pins.