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1 While the history of the health communication field is not the purpose of this research project, Kreps et al. presents a thorough overview of the growth in this area in terms of literature, refereed journals, health communication divisions in professional organizations like ICA and AEJMC. Also, they note the demand for health communication scholars across in communication programs in universities across the globe.
25 Years of Thematic and Episodic: A Content Analysis of the Scholarly Research in Academic Journals
We conducted a quantitative content analysis of the scholarly journal articles investigating thematic and episodic frames in health news. While our effort is similar to other investigations of framing research—to expand theoretical and practical knowledge of framing research—primarily we want to develop a better understanding of how thematic and episodic frames have been used to study health news by examining specific variables. We present a variety of descriptive findings from our study, followed by a more in-depth analysis of how thematic and episodic frames in health news have been studied, both conceptually and operationally.
As Matthes notes, operational definitions in framing studies can be “translated to frame indicators or cited to ground the reader in framing literature” (2009, p. 350). The studies we included in our analysis fall into two categories: ones using thematic and episodic framing definitions in the literature review only, and ones operationalizing thematic and episodic frames for measurement or testing. We present the findings in two stages. We cover the results from an analysis of all the studies included in our analysis, followed by a separate look at the research articles that tested/measured thematic and episodic frames—actual operationalization. Analyzing the studies that operationalized thematic and episodic frames separate from the others allows us to gauge how knowledge of these frames has advanced theoretically and practically.
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Assessing the State of Thematic/Episodic Framing Research on Health News
We developed a list of search terms to capture published journal articles about thematic and episodic frames (see Appendix A for a list of search terms). We opted for breadth in our first search for scholarly articles, thus entering the search terms into all relevant academic databases, including Academic Search (EBSCO), ComAbstracts, Communication Source, and JSTOR. We did not include books, book chapters or monographs, which some may consider a limitation. We focused on journal articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. While we did our best to cast a wide net to capture all journal articles relevant to our search, we realize it’s unlikely we were successful. Our initial search resulted in 702 articles. After removing duplicate articles, our pool totaled 616.
Three trained coders examined the articles to determine which studies should be selected for analysis. The coder training for this part of the study involved three sessions followed by one session to refine the initial coding sheet. We selected articles based on the following criteria: 1) studies that operationalized thematic and episodic frames for frame extraction/ measurement/ testing, or 2) studies that defined thematic and episodic frames for conceptual purposes to ground the reader, 3) studies examining news coverage (news content production, news content, and news content effects)1 and 4) studies examining social problems. We defined a social problem as a recognized “condition or situation that (at least some) actors label a ‘problem’ in the arenas of public discourse and action, defining it as harmful” (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988, p 70). Using a social determinants of health approach (SDH), which posits public health and health disparities are affected by social, environmental, historical, political, and economic factors, we included all research about health issues that met our criteria for inclusion.
To establish intercoder reliability, a 10% random sample was selected and the four criteria variables were coded. Sufficient reliability was reached on the use of thematic and episodic frames (citing in literature for grounding or operationalization Kalpha = .86), and whether the research examined news (Kalpha = .98). Sufficient reliability was not achieved on social issue topic (Hayes & Krippendorf, 2007). During a training session, we refined our criteria to be more specific. A second full round of coding on a 10% random sample with the revised codebook and ←38 | 39→the same coders resulted in sufficient reliability on topics defined as a social issue (Kalpha = .84). The final pool included 122 scholarly journal articles.
As we discussed earlier, a preliminary review of the 122 articles revealed the