Media’s Perception on Health Disparities: A Meta-Analysis of Newspaper Publications Introduction As a country, the United States has aimed to eliminate health disparities as a national health goal (US DHHS, 2000). Many of the causes of these inequities have been cited as originating at the individual and societal level. Some of these individual factors include socioeconomic level, genetics and cultural beliefs or attitudes. Societal level policy impacts provider service, environmental exposure, and healthcare access. To meet this target, health disparity concerns must be addressed through public advocacy and policy change. How do mainstream media interpret health disparity reports to the public? Overall, mainstream media plays an important role toward influencing social change. Thus, how the media “frames” reporting on health disparity concerns is an essential component in public opinion and, in turn, policy reform. Framing sets up habits of thoughts and expectations of the reader. Framing plays an important role in assigning the responsibility for the causes and solutions of social concerns (Gilliam, 2005). With over half of the American population reading newspapers either online or in print (PRCPP, 2002), this type of venue offer a representative perspective of the media’s perception of health disparities. There has been very little in the research arena that addresses racial/ethnic health disparities in the media. Objectives The purpose of this report is to gain insight into how the issues of racial health disparities have been covered and framed in the news media. 1. Which racial health disparities receive the most attention? 2. How is racial health disparities framed in the news media? 3. What has been cited as the cause of the disparity? 4. Have solutions been reported to address these issues? Methods Newspaper publications were identified based on the 20 highest national circulations, as reported from Tthe Audit Bureau of Circulations. Articles from these newspaper publications were retrieved from the LexisNexis public-use media search site. We limited our search to the time period between 06/01/2006 to 08/31/2006. After viewing retrieved articles, false hits were eliminated using established inclusion criteria. Our inclusion criteria for articles were: 1) Population of interest in the United States; 2) English language; 3) Term “race” used as population group; 4) Health topic may be disease, access, or prevention; 5) Health topic and race/ethnicity must be discussed in relation to each other. Results Cancer (19.3%), obesity (19.3%), and sexually transmitted diseases (19.3%) were the most popular health topics. Disparities concerning Blacks (66.7%) and Latinos (21.1%) were the most frequently addressed. Cultural issues were the most commonly reported cause (52.6%) for disparities, with health care provider issues as the least common (21.2%). Furthermore, solutions to disparities were mostly cultural-based approaches (38.6%). Solutions to health disparities concerning health care providers and economic development were the least mentioned (6.4%). Conclusion Health disparity issues have been narrowly addressed by the media. Causes and solutions have been attributed to an individual level. A broader social context of disease must be considered, such as environment, genetics, socioeconomic status, and providers in order for societal changes to take place. Education of media reporters concerning the causes of health disparities and their role in public policy change, as well as further study in media coverage of health disparities is recommended. Tonantzin E. Soto, M.P.H., John A. Capitman, Ph.D., and Marlene Bengiamin, Ph.D. Central Valley Health Policy Institute, College of Health and Human Services Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge the support of The California Endowment, the College of Health and Human Services, and the UC Davis School of Medicine Public Opinion Policy Health Outcomes Media Coverage Descriptive Results We applied content analysis method (GAO, 1996) to evaluate how the issues of racial health disparities have been covered and framed in the news media. This systematic technique was used to reduce the information into fewer content categories based on our explicit rules of coding. Each article was coded for publication, population of interest, data source, statistical data used, health condition, causal framing, and solution framing. Each cause and solution was coded separately for each article to capture this data. After data were coded we used the SPSS 11.0 software for descriptive analysis. Framing of Disease Framing of Race/Ethnicity