(De)constructing Health News
An analysis of the lifecycle of elderly-related
health news stories through multi-sited,
linguistic ethnographic research
Jana Declercq
Ghent University
Interdisciplinary Discourse Studies workshop, Aalborg University
24-26/08/2015
Outline
• The entire project:
▫ Research group structure
▫ General background: why elderly-related health
news?
▫ Research design
• My PhD:
▫ Research questions
▫ Method
▫ Challenges
(De)Constructing Health News
A transdisciplinary investigation:
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Communication studies
Journalism studies
Linguistics
Sociology
Medicine
 Health, Media & Society
(www.healthmediasociety.net)
(De)Constructing Health News
Team:
• 6 Supervisors
• 1 postdoc researcher
• 4 PhD researchers
Why health?
Why news?
Why the elderly?
Four Societal Evolutions
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Increasing health care costs
Ageing of the population
Medicalization
Healthism
Health & Elderly: 4 Societal
Evolutions
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Increasing health care costs
Ageing of the population
Medicalization
Healthism
 Why media-central perspective?
Medical Journalism
“All this information not only influences
awareness, attitudes, and intentions but may also
contribute to changes in behavior, health care
utilization, clinical practices, and health policies.”
(Levi 2001: 4)
Research Design
STAKEHOLDER
ANALYSIS
Sociology
NEWS STORY
LIFECYCLE ANALYSIS
NEWS OUTPUT:
CONTENT, FRAMES,
DISCOURSES
AUDIENCE
RESEARCH
Journalism Studies
Linguistics
Communication
studies
My PhD
• What are the production processes and practices
underlying the construction of elderly-related
health news at different stakeholders?
• How do media and other stakeholders interact,
and which changes do news stories undergo
while travelling back and forth between them?
My PhD
• Method:
▫ Multi-sited, case-oriented, linguistic ethnography
• Sites:
▫ Newspaper
▫ Monthly magazine targeting people over 50
▫ Pharmaceutical company
▫ Health insurance agency
Linguistic Ethnography
Ethnography?
• Origins in anthropology
• ≠ fieldwork, method of data collection
• = paradigm
“Reality in its kaleidoscopic, complex, complicated
nature” (Blommaert 2006: 14)
“Capacity of challenging established views”
(Blommaert 2006: 13)
Linguistic Ethnography
• Language and the (social) world are mutually
shaping (Rampton 2007)
• We need to:
▫ study language and talk in interaction to
understand the context,
▫ and study the context to understand the language
• Materiality
 Focus on discursive data
Linguistic ethnography
• “An open and exploratory, even experimental
platform” (Blommaert 2007: 683)
• Very data-driven (Agar 1996)
• Combining different kinds of:
▫ Data
▫ Frameworks
▫ Methods and units of analysis
• Role of the researcher
Challenges
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Unpredictable data
Access to elite settings
Ethics & anonymization
Possibly distorting presence of the researcher
Openness of the platform:
linguistic/philosophical theoretical grounding
• Transdisciplinarity!
▫ Combining frameworks/methods/… in my PhD
▫ Combining insights from four different PhDs
Theo Van Leeuwen (2005:8)
‘The idea of discipline is in effect narrowed down
to “skill”- to the analytical and interpretative skills
that can contribute in specific ways to integrated
projects. In such a context I no longer say, for
instance, “I am a linguist”, setting myself apart
from other researchers, but, “I know how to do
cetain types of linguistic research and can
therefore make a specific and useful contribution
to interdisciplinary research projects.’
Thank you for listening!