Testing the Impact of Public Health Framing and Rich Sourcing.

This study examines whether changing the way newspaper stories report health news can induce shifts in readers' perceptions of significant health problems such as obesity, diabetes, immigrant health, and smoking. Two variables were manipulated in a controlled experiment: the quality of sourcing in the stories, and changing from an episodic, traditional frame to a thematic or public health frame. A public health frame involved incorporating information on context, risk factors, prevention strategies, and social attributions of responsibility. This study found that a public health frame did make readers more supportive of public policy changes and encourage them to change their own health behaviors. However, it did not alter their attributions of responsibility for health problems from one of blaming individuals to seeing the larger social factors.Adding richer sourcing to the public health frame did not increase these effects, nor did readers find the public health stories to be more interesting, relevant, believable, important, and informative. In addition, there were differential results due to story topics that represent uncontrolled effects. The implications for improving health reporting to encourage positive change in society are discussed.The authors would like to thank Ph.D. student Liz Gardner for her expert assistance creating the stories. This research was funded by a grant from the California Endowment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]