The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #69785

Lindsay McLaren, PhD, Rosemary Perry, BSc, Lesley Carruthers-Roe, MA, and Penelope Hawe, PhD. Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, G230 Health Sciences Centre, 3330 Hospital Dr. NW, Calgary, AB T2N 4N1, Canada, (403) 210-9424, lmclaren@ucalgary.ca

A better understanding of community-level influences on health may come from the development of indicators for characterising communities. In this project we developed an indicator of “reputation” for communities in Calgary, based on their portrayal in the daily citywide newspaper. Ten ‘high-risk’ and ten ‘low-risk’ communities were selected based on their well being score assigned by the municipal government, which took into account economic, social, and physical well being. Using constructed weeks sampling, 119 dates were selected from an 8.5 year period. These dates were searched by community name as keyword, and all references to each community were downloaded from a full-text online newspaper index. References were rated as positive, negative, or neutral, based on a coding scheme developed iteratively throughout the process. Independent rating was done by two raters who were blind to community identity, and high levels of inter-rater reliability were confirmed. Results showed that, on average, the ‘high risk’ communities had significantly more references in the newspaper, expressed as a per capita value (p<.05), and a significantly higher proportion of references rated as negative (p<.01), relative to ‘low risk’ communities. However the extent to which the high and low risk communities differed on print media reputation score (t-scores 2.8 and 5.2) was less than the extent to which they differed on the well being index on which they were selected (t = 17.4), suggesting that the media does not appear to exaggerate differences between advantaged and disadvantaged communities.

Learning Objectives:

• To recognise the importance of social climate or the social environment as an influence on health;
• To appreciate the challenge of developing community-level indicators of this sort;
• To learn about one procedure for quantifying community reputation, using the print media as a data source.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.